The Glade 4.0

Hey Gurus, I'm having a problem.

I installed a new game, got to the opening screen and changed the resolution through the options setting. The new resolution took effect, about a second later, my monitor gave me a "No Signal" and black screen.

The comp re-boots fine, and I can log on blindly (as I've got no video), I hear the Windows (XP) welcome music, but no output to monitor. I've attached my laptop to my monitor and that worked, so the monitor is fine.
I've reseated my RAM and my video card (8800 GTX) to no avail. I disconnected my optical drives from the PSU but nada.

Nothing new other than the game.

I guess I'm left with thinking the video card is kaput, but I have a feeling in the back of my head that it's somehow related to the game settings change. Is there (here comes speculation based on ignorance of which I speak) something that could have changed (drivers, BIOS...) that would cause this?

Any help would be appreciated, I'm not looking for an excuse to get the "Fastest Video Card EVAR!", really.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Reinstall your video driver. Perhaps it got corrupted. Can you get into safe mode?

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

Also, if you are running XP just reboot, tap f8 and select 'last known good configuration' and that would fix any setting changes that may have occured I think.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

Yup, let us know if safe mode or last known good is working and we'll know the next step.

Sadly, I've got absolutely nothing from the monitor at any time (other than "No Signal" when I turn the monitor off and on), so I can't tell if I'm in safe mode or not.

I do appreciate the quick responses though.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I need more clarifcation:

Are you getting video output at all during the BIOS portion of the boot process?

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Nope, nothing on screen at any time.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Well, that pretty well rules out anything specific to Windows, then. It's not your drivers or anything like that.

Unfortunately, that doesn't leave a whole lot on the table other than hardware failure. If the system boots with the card in place, then it seems like there can't be anything catastrophically wrong with the card. That is, if there were a serious GPU failure, you'd generally expect the system to crash, even if though the device is "peripheral". Perhaps only the card's RAMDAC has failed? It would be helpful if we could gather more information about the failure, but that could be tricky if you can't get some kind of two-way communication with Windows.

If it is a hardware failure, it could occur about anywhere along the line. You've already tested the monitor separately on another computer; that's good. We also need to eliminate the video cable, if that wasn't already tested with the monitor. There could be something wrong with the motherboard's expansion slot for the video card -- PCI-E (express), I'm guessing? Or the problem could be with the card itself. Either way, it would be helpful to know if the card is even being detected by BIOS and Windows.

If you've set up your desktop PC to allow for remote desktop, you could talk to Windows that way from your laptop and see what the device manager is showing. If you didn't enable it before this happened, it gets kind of complicated. However, it is possible to remotely enable remote desktop.

Another thing to try (if you have a PCI-E bus) would be to put your video card in a different PCI-E slot. The card should be able to negotiate down to a smaller number of lanes if you plug it into an x8 or x4 slot. I'm not sure if they'll fit at all into x1 and x2 slots. I suspect not. But if the card will plug into a slot at all (even with left over pins on the card), it is safe to do so. Doing so will kill your performance, of course, but it could be diagnostically useful if you can get the card to work in a different slot. If that's not an option, I'd try plugging it in to a completely different computer, if possible.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

So, I'll see if I have another PCI-E slot. Another computer is problematic.
Remotely enabling remote desktop sounds interesting.

I'll let you know about the PCI-E slot situation when I get a chance to check it out.

Thanks for your advice, I'm sure I'll be back for more.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

LCD monitor?

The bulbs are notoriously short-lived. Likely it (the bulb) just needs to be replaced.

If you can, verify that the monitor won't work on any other PCs (head to a friend's, relative's, whomever's). If it still doesn't work, try this.

http://www.inventgeek.com/Projects/shorts/lcdfix.aspx

More often than not with LCD's it's the bulb that dies. And instead of paying another several hundred dollars for a new monitor, you can likely just get it fixed for 20 - 40 bucks.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

He's tested the monitor on another machine.

But, yeah, LCD backlights and the power built-in power inverter for the LCD backlight are both pretty prone to failure. Fortunately, they're easy to replace yourself, and relatively cheap. Cool trick: You can test if it's just a bad backlight by shining a bright flashlight at your monitor while your system is running .

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I didn't see him mentioning he tested it on another machine. Although if he's getting "No Signal" that's kinda also proof that it's not the bulb.

Question: Will your PC boot up just like it does if you remove your video card completely? In days of yore, if your video card wasn't working properly your PC wouldn't even POST and you'd get,if memory serves.... one long and three short beeps (checking: woot, I was right).

Most motherboards these days come with onboard video. If your computer boots up just fine without the video card, then my hunch is that if (when) the video card failed, it failed-over to your onboard video. If you plug in your monitor to your onboard video (you may need a converter, which all video cards come with) does it work?

If it does, your video card is likely toast. Though there is a chance it's the PCI-E slot. And then there's the really bad (yet not too common) scenario where one affected the other, and it's now a double-problem.

_________________
Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

I'm with Stathol on trying to remote into your machine.

If you haven't enabled remote desktop, you could still probably access computer management remotely (on your laptop, right click My Computer, select Manage, and then right click the top entry and select Manage Another Computer (or is it connect to another computer? either way..)). Or you can remotely enable remote desktop, as Stathol points out.

I'd check device manager and event logs.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

This seems obvious, but its worth suggesting. Try disconnecting the power from the monitor. Teekela and I both had an Acer monitor that would sometimes not recognize the signal coming from the PC on startup. The fix was to disconnect power from the monitor and restart.

Also, if the monitor supports it, you might try a different input.

Remoting in and changing your resolution and refresh rates is definitely worth a shot as well.

So, here's an update. I tried the other PCI-E slot, no dice. Disconnecting the monitor from power and reconnecting/rebooting didn't work. Manage another computer didn't work (event viewer says RPC server unavailable).
I think I'm going to go with PsTools to remotely enable remote desktop.

Any warnings or other suggestions? I greatly appreciate all that you've given me so far.

_________________
"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Have you tried a different cable, and/or a different input on the Monitor?

Midgen:

Yup, I connected to my laptop, and the monitor worked fine using the cable.

So, I'm running into problems with PSTools (Make sure that the default admin$ share is enabled on "desktop"), the FAQ states that my desktop running XP Home may be an issue. Any help? Am I SOL? Should I get a graphics card to plug in, just to see? Thanks again.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

For your edification, it was the video card. I just found it strange that it died without a whimper.

I plugged in a new card, all's good.

Any recommendations on GPU's at ~$200?

_________________
"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko