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Video signal lost after boot.

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by Member 27571987

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I left my computer on while I went to work. When I came home I tried to wake the system by moving the mouse and then the keyboard. It appeared like it didn't want to wake up. I restarted the system and after the windows splash screen my computer lost video signal. I have a lcd monitor and I am using the dvi connection on my video card. I am receiving the digit signal / analog signal as it is searching for a signal. I tried restarting to Last known good configuration and the same thing happened. I tried to restart in safe mode and same thing happened. If I press the reset button I will not get any video. I have to completely power down.

Thinking it could be the video card. I am able to work in the bios without loosing video. I even started the system with a Knoppix disc and it ran without any problems. I never lost video.

After the knoppix disc I restarted the system. Windows loaded fine this time. I ran a defrag and set it to run chkdisk on the next restart. After I did that it lost the video signal again.

After sitting over night, I started the system and it started fine. I checked the event viewer and didn't see anything that related. So I did what I needed to do and then shutdown instead of leaving it running.

My system is: AMD 2Ghz, 1GB PC2700, 80 GB HD
Gforce4 Ti4400 128mb
hard drive is partitioned 40GB/40GB
Windows XP Home
2 case fans running fine
CPU fan running fine
Video card fan running fine
dual fans in PS running fine.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

4 replies

by older mycroft

Where you said:

[i]"After sitting over night, I started the system and it started fine. I checked the event viewer and didn't see anything that related."[/i]

Did you go back at least TWO days in the event viewer ?

The Ti4400 is getting pretty long in the tooth now, do you have the opportunity to borrow another video card ?

I'd try taking the video card out and re-seating it. Could the system have suffered a 'bump' of some kind while you were out at work ?

by Member 27571987

system is under a desk out of the way of feet. No chance it was bumped. I went back 3 days in the event viewer just to be sure.

I thought it could be the video card, but why would it work fine under a knoppix boot and have intermittent issues in XP?

The card is old but it still gets the job done for my needs.

by older mycroft

If you'll pardon the pun :D

I'd have been more reassured if your reply was that there was no-one else at home while you were at work.

Under a desk or not, while you were at work a bump [i]may have occurred[/i], that is my only concern here.

As to Knoppix having no problems, your graphics card under Knoppix would be running with different drivers, or even under OpenGL.

Also, under Knoppix, your graphics card may have not been placed under any degree of load since the OS is much less graphically intense.

Windows drivers for ALL graphics cards, particularly the old ones, are particularly prone to 'over-updating' and you may have updated your graphics drivers beyond the sensible point.

I personally have a laptop with GeForce 5200 graphics, so I'm only one step up from your 4400 - but I've only updated my drivers once, back in January 2006.

ALL nVidia forceware upgrades from that point on, have caused various and nefarious problems for the 'older' generations of GeForce cards.

Graphics cards can sometimes prise themselves out of their slots, or a build-up of dust can cause intermittent failures too.

You might consider opening up the case and having a look at any possible build-up of detritus insode the case. A can of compressed air would be a useful tool for giving it a clean out, particularly around the cooling fans, both case and GPU.

BUT NOT the PSU.

I'm afraid intermittent graphics problems are a real pain. But anything is worth trying once.

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