Monitor goes black

[D+1]

Okay, this is not necessarily a real problem but it bothers me. What I've got is a monitor that keeps blacking out on me for a moment and then coming back up - usually. Once it went black and stayed that way until I rebooted. This seems to happen fairly often when I bring the monitor back up from sleeping, but not always. The real problem is that it also happens occasionally while I'm playing City of Heroes. 5 seconds of black screen during a fight is eternity! AS it goes black I often see the display expanding/zooming in, almost as if it's changing or resetting the screen resolution.

Graphics card is ATI Radeon 9600se, monitor is Optiquest v95 that's probably 5+ years old. Drivers, et. al. are all updated. The problem didn't start with the changing of anything about the system that I can recall and I reverted to an earlier Restore Point when it first started so that clearly didn't affect it.

Because of the age of the monitor I assume it to be the most likely culprit but I'd like to hear opinions/suggestions before I go blow $400-$600 on a new 17" LCD.

 

[Chris Tavares]

I had a problem very similar to this, and it was a monitor that was slowly dying. I would suggest grabbing another known good monitor from somewhere and seeing if it has the same problem. If not, you've found the culprit. Otherwise, its the graphics card.

I seriously suspect the monitor on this one though.