So, I’ve got an intermittent failure in my home computer that is really annoying to me, and I’m hoping you can give me some ideas to tease it out.
It’s a video out failure, usu, if not always, when I’m starting it from sleep or off. All the usual noises that Windows makes booting up, but the monitor displays ‘no video signal’. I’ve pulled the cable out and hooked it into my laptop and the monitor and cables are all fine.
I’ve had it into the shop that built it, but they’ve never duplicated the failure. I always hear that they updated the drivers and reviewed the fault logs, ‘and it’s fine, now.’ But the problem persists.
Anyway, I’m looking for ideas about which pieces of hardware to consider removing and replacing. I’m assuming a software problem is not it.
It could be software, it sounds quite likely to be software. You need another monitor around when it happens to find out if there actually is a video signal. Unfortunately some video interfaces can sense when the monitor is disconnected and when you connect the other monitor the condition may have changed. If you can remote connect to the machine from another one when it fails you could check the device and driver status. I assume your computer has diagnostics which may reveal a hardware issue.
One of the monitors at work behaves oddly. It behaves the same on multiple machines too, and it’s the only monitor that has this problem. It fails to recognise that it is now getting a video signal again after the PC has woken from sleep. The only solution is to unplug it until it is completely powered down, and then powering it up again. Directly connecting to an already awake machine when it is in the befuddled state works just fine, it’s just not responding to the sleep/awake cycle.
It is a mystery - all the drivers seem up to date, there’s nothing in the event logs etc.
My monitor has a similar glitch where I try to turn it on and nothing happens, if I un/replug it, it works fine. I’ve tried this before, with my video fault, but no joy, this time I unplugged the tower and then rebooted and I’m back in business. Weird, but if I can clear it at myself, it’s good enough for me.