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- Computer monitor acts up by going dark. Have replaced the cable from the computer to the monitor as well as the monitor's power supply. Monitor will return to operation if its power supply is disconnected and then reconnected. No Win 11 Event Viewer hardware errors are reported.
I've been having problems for the past few weeks with the display on my Dell computer. I bought the computer new back in 2019 or so, which makes it about 6 years old. My monitor is a 27" HP monitor that I bought for another computer (an HP Pavilion), recently demised, back in about 2012 or 2013. As far as I can tell, the computer, which is running a 10-core Xeon Scalable processor, is functioning as it should.
The first symptom was that the screen would go dark, which I would attempt to address by rebooting the computer. What I've recently found is that I can get the monitor to come back on by unplugging its power cord and then plugging it back in. My first stab at a solution was to replace the cable from the NVidia card (a P2000 model that came with the Dell) with a new cable. Originally I had both computers, the HP and the Dell, sharing the monitor, keyboard and mouse through a KVM switch. This involved a plethora of cables since one of the inputs on the monitor is an HDMI socket, while the NVidia card has DisplayPort sockets. After the HP died, I removed the KVM and simplified the cable to a single HDMI-HDMI cable with an HDMI/DisplayPort adaptor attached. Although things improved somewhat, the computer monitor would still occasionally go blank.
I then bought a single cable with HDMI at one end and DisplayPort at the other end. This didn't seem to make much difference.
My next step was to replace the monitor power supply. If you remember, I've had this monitor for at least 12 years. I received a new monitor power supply yesterday, but my wife reported that the screen went blank for her once. I had told her that if this happens, see if unplugging the monitor's power supply and plugging it back in. She did this and the computer worked fine for her.
I should mention that the Windows (11) Event Viewer has not shown any hardware problems throughout this whole journey. So far my attempts to solve the problem have been very inexpensive, coming to about $25 in all. My motto is repairing things is, if you're going to throw parts at a problem, start with the least expensive parts.
It seems to me that since the problem persists, that the problem is a) the monitor (12 to 13 years old) or the NVidia card (6 to 7 years old). Replacing either would be about $200. I don't think the problem is the computer's power supply itself.
Does anyone have any advice about what I should do going forward?
The first symptom was that the screen would go dark, which I would attempt to address by rebooting the computer. What I've recently found is that I can get the monitor to come back on by unplugging its power cord and then plugging it back in. My first stab at a solution was to replace the cable from the NVidia card (a P2000 model that came with the Dell) with a new cable. Originally I had both computers, the HP and the Dell, sharing the monitor, keyboard and mouse through a KVM switch. This involved a plethora of cables since one of the inputs on the monitor is an HDMI socket, while the NVidia card has DisplayPort sockets. After the HP died, I removed the KVM and simplified the cable to a single HDMI-HDMI cable with an HDMI/DisplayPort adaptor attached. Although things improved somewhat, the computer monitor would still occasionally go blank.
I then bought a single cable with HDMI at one end and DisplayPort at the other end. This didn't seem to make much difference.
My next step was to replace the monitor power supply. If you remember, I've had this monitor for at least 12 years. I received a new monitor power supply yesterday, but my wife reported that the screen went blank for her once. I had told her that if this happens, see if unplugging the monitor's power supply and plugging it back in. She did this and the computer worked fine for her.
I should mention that the Windows (11) Event Viewer has not shown any hardware problems throughout this whole journey. So far my attempts to solve the problem have been very inexpensive, coming to about $25 in all. My motto is repairing things is, if you're going to throw parts at a problem, start with the least expensive parts.
It seems to me that since the problem persists, that the problem is a) the monitor (12 to 13 years old) or the NVidia card (6 to 7 years old). Replacing either would be about $200. I don't think the problem is the computer's power supply itself.
Does anyone have any advice about what I should do going forward?
