My monitor blinks.I don't know where to start fixing.

[steve_ss]

My brother and I built this computer a couple of years ago. Everything worked well except when I would preview clips in Video Studio 10, the sceen would go black for a second or two. This didn,t happen on my old E-Machine. I have learned to live it, no problem.
Recently as this computer has become slugish and unstable I have been trying to clean it up and fix problems, using mostly CCleaner to fix registry issues, remove unused software and unnecessary start up programs.
Now I have the blinking screen problem more often, not only when using Video Studio.
I tried updating the vidoe card software but my monitor went black, I restarted in safe mode and restored settings. It is working again.
Any help about where to begin would be appreciated.

Operating System: Windows XP Professional
Motherboard: ASUS P5LD2 Delux Intel 945 P C
Graphic Card: ASUS EN6600-TD 256 MB DDR PCIE
Sound Card: ASUS Realtec
Processor: INTEL PENTIUM 4 550J 3.4GHZ
Hard Disk Drive: HITACHI 80 & 250 sSATA 8MB
Memory: KINGSTON KVR533D2N4K2/3G (2X512 + 2X1G)

[Clevo]

What sort of monitor do you have?

[2Dogs]

Hard to figure out what might be wrong, but don't forget some basics.

Run chkdsk on the drives - on the OS partition it will run in a blue dos screen when you reboot after scheduling it.

Also go into BIOS and schedule a full RAM test - could be a bad module amongst the four you have installed.

You could experiment with running the machine with different permutations and combinations of RAM too - VS will run with as little as 256MB in XP.

Check for updated drivers for the motherboard on the Asus site, and they have a few pages of FAQ's qhich might be worth going thru.

Otherwise I might suspect a video problem. Not sure if you have integrated graphics or a separate video card. If the latter, look for updated drivers for the card.

[Ron P.]

Just to add to how difficult it can be to determine the cause, and what all may cause things like this..

About a month ago I started having a similar problem with my desktop monitor. I would be working, then my monitor would dim, blink, and I would loose the display. The monitor would be on, however no display. I could turn the monitor off and back on to regain the display. This become more frequent as time went on. One thing to note, is the cooling fan on my video card (Nvidia GeForce 5500), started making noise on boot-up.

My first diagnoses was, fan is dirty, and failing. So I took the video card out, removed the fan, and completely cleaned it. Fan no longer made noise, which lasted about 2 weeks, and no more blinking or loosing display.

Well last week it started up again, noise and loss of display. So with that it was time to purchase a new video card. They were out of the card (can't upgrade without replacing the power supply unit), so they ordered it, and shipped it to my house.

Now as soon as I returned home from ordering, I fired up my desktop, and did not have the problem. I left my PC on for a few days, without shutting it down, still no problem..

Well the card arrived 2 days ago, however since my monitor was not currently acting up, I didn't even open the shipping box. Here comes the punch line...

Yesterday while working on my desktop it started to act up again. No biggie, have the replacement right behind me.. But I noticed one thing that was different. When my desktop was not acting up, I did not have my laptop connected to my antiquated Cat5 Network. I was doing a tutorial on it, so disabled the network adapter on my laptop. Shortly after enabling the network adapter on my laptop, my desktop once again started acting up. I though what the ???? So to troubleshoot, I disabled it, and my desktop monitor has been working fine all day, all night..

So to end this long tale, I've thought I was fairly good at troubleshooting PCs, done if for years. But at a loss, at how a net card is affecting my PC, when the adapter on a Latop connected via Cat5 to a Linksys router is causing this problem on my Desktop? I still think that my video card is weak, and may need replaced, but is it?

[2Dogs]

I notice there have been quite a few Realtek network driver updates, which appear as "optional", and might therefore be easy to miss if you normally just go for automatic updates for security fixes.

On the bright side, though, you might now be able to have an SLI setup! (with 2 x 5500!)

[Ron P.]

On the bright side, though, you might now be able to have an SLI setup! (with 2 x 5500!)

Naw I'm waiting to see if I can get 4 or 8 5500's, to go along with my Quad-Quad core ..

[steve_ss]

Clevo my monitor is a Samsung 19", model 915 NA.