Monitor zzz's

[Mathias]

Hello from a phone. Today I turned off the computer for ten mins to do some quick shopping. My computer was fine before then. I came home and tried to turn it on only for the monitor to say it can't detect a vga or dvi signal. Sleep mode. Not the first time this has happened so I did the usual wire checking and restarting game. Nothing. So I checked the wires and the video card inside the tower. Nothing wrong. Figuring it would fix itself like it had before, I left it for a bit to do other work. Hours later, I started calling friends to help. They left at 11pm est and the monitor is still refusing to leave sleep mode. Not sure what I didn't do, but no desktop/Coth for me. Anyone run into this problem? What solution did you find?

[Kretol]

My monitor on my server computer has been annoying like that before. What type of cable are you using? If you're using DVI, try switching to a VGA cable.

[hiddengecko]

It sounds like it could be a dead graphics processor or potentially a damaged monitor cable. The monitor itself is powering on, so it's probably fine. Have you noticed any graphical glitches recently

Things like this:

Spoiler:

or had any unexpected shutdowns, or had your screen black out when it shouldn't? Things like that can be symptoms of a GPU overheating, and if that happens enough it'll eventually just give out.

You might try plugging the monitor into your onboard video port and see if that fixes it - if you're not sure where that is (I don't know how computer savvy you are) you're looking for the motherboard I/O cluster.

Generally it looks kinda like this:

Spoiler:

If that fixes it, your graphics card is likely dead and you'll probably want to order a new one; onboard video is generally quite underpowered.

If that doesn't fix it, either your motherboard is one of the sorts that requires the CPU to handle the onboard graphics (and your CPU is an older one that doesn't have that feature) or, more likely, the monitor cable is broken.

There are other possibilities as well, like bad firmware or faulty drivers, but those issues are generally quite rare and it doesn't sound like you changed anything related to them.

[Mathias]

Jumped to laptop, so at least typing is easier.

@Kretol
The old computer I use for everything needs a converter for VGA-DVI. Tower has nothing for VGA because it's dumb and I was a dumb kid when I bought it. A friend bought a new one, thinking it might help. Nothing.

@hiddengecko
No graphics glitches. No random shutdowns or blackouts. Didn't try the onboard video port, so I'll look into that.