About 2 weeks ago i was playing Warcraft and the screen went black, i was able to hit the windows key and return to the desktop and click on the game and continue. Over the last 2 weeks this has got worse to the point that it would happen whilst on the desktop, if i left it, it would flick back on and then off. Now when i start the computer i can see it loading but then goes black at the point where you would log in. Its not as black as if the monitor was off and there is still power going into it. Tried so far; Opening machine and making sure the graphics card (Nvidia 6800GS) is embedded correctly. Ensured all wires are sucurely in. Hooking the monitor up to a laptop (Still experienced the same problem) I can start the machine in Safe mode and get to the desktop that way, and also in VGA mode...in each ive tried to increase the resolution by 1 incriment and when i click apply it goes off. So, it looks like it is struggling to display other than at the bare resolution. Monitor - Acer AL1916W (18mths old) Pentium P4 HT 1024mb Ram XP Home If i can supply any other information please let me know...any ideas on what is causing this and/or how i can resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Update: Loading up in safe mode again i decided to hit no and go to system restore. Rolled it back to the 11th Jan, and restarted computer....to my amazement it worked, been able to access internet and i ran a game to see if it can handle the resolution...both worked fine. Like i said this has been a minor issue for the last 2 weeks, just last night it gave up on me. Im still curious as to what this could be, what could the problem have been that a system restart has resolved? I'll keep checking on this post over the next week or so to see if anyone has an ideas. Thanks in advance.
Probably you have a corrupted video driver, the restoration bring back the computer to a point when the video driver was ok., if that happen again you can boot in safe mode uninstall the video driver, restart and reinstall the video driver.
Indeed, video drivers can get degraded (particularly nvidia ones) over time. Sometimes all that's needed is a rollback in certain settings to restore them. To be safe though, I'd recommend reinstalling the driver, or better still getting the latest version.
Thanks for your advice, i'll update drivers whilst i can still see the screen. One thing though that still confuses me, i still had the same problem when i connected my laptop up to the monitor...again it worked fine until it cut off when the login screen should have been dispalyed. Thanks again.