OK guys here's the deal, every so often, around once a week, my monitor will just switch to standby and I have to shut down my PC and the monitor will not work for a few hours.

The strange thing is that over time the monitor will stay on for longer at boot up each time, first it will be for a split second, and eventually it will stay on. The monitor is receiving a signal as it does not display the no signal message, but it cannot come out of standby for long.

I have reseated the vid card, cleaned all connections, re-installed the drivers, all to no avail.

A couple of times it has also re-installed the vid card drivers at boot, but not every time, and it could have been me moving the card to another slot.

So what do you guys reckon then?

Well a simple and sure way to tell is hook up another monitor and test it I guess....

but that's just it -on ewould have to have a spare one lying around...

No spare in the house, I already thought of that. I am trying to find some commonality between each occurence, but so far no luck.

these are just theories, most the time people bitch how wrong i am, but i think i am usually right, at least partially.
hmm, there is a power manager setting in control panel, there are a few different access points to this, some that just control monitor sleepmode and not just computer hybernation. this fucked me up before too. there are also setting at boot up with accessing the bios for energy star/power compliant crap. i always disable hibernate/sleepmode/powerdowns on everything. onother long shot is that you are running programs in front/main memory that dont recognize your mouse movement to stop times screensaver/powerdown modes. i know pc engine emulator did this to me, every 10 minutes it would power down.

again, these are just ideas.
other things,
feel the top of your monitor, along the vents, it is usually hot, but if it is painfully hot the fuses may pop on and off(i used to work in a fuse factory).
-wiggle the cable between the monitor and cpu box, check for misplaced bent pins, check if your monitor is next to an open window, an ironing board, microwave, shag carpet, hanging plant above it, faulty home wiring,
and as a last resort
go on a shooting spree.
kill em all, the blood of the innocent bathes the atonement of the righteous.

Boot into bios, leave it there. If your monitor screws up, then its your monitor, if it doesn't, boot into windows. See if the monitor screws up. If so I'd say it's your drivers.

GFX card error would be OS hang. You can see if its this by binding some keys/ highlighting winamp, wait for it to boff then press return if winamp plays the system is fine. You can also use tv-out if just one goes, then its your monitor

However before doing any of these (hehe maybe I should have said this first in that case), make sure you have absolutely positively killed every hibenating feature in the room! In bios and windows powermanagement too.

Or just disconnect the signal cable from your monitor and leave it on?

Thanks guys, I will try all suggestions, including the most fun sounding from Mr S, that shooting spree, you mean my PC or outside with the general public?

I will get back to you.

Strange, I have re-installed the default drivers that came with my vid card, these gave me no problems for a year so I will give them another whizz. I have checked the cables and it made no difference. All powersaving etc have been disabled, altho I double checked and they were still off.

The actual monitor does not feel hot, and there is no weird smell. I am totally at a loss as to what it could be.

When it goes the monitor will come on for a bit and then flick off, but this all while the PC is running thru the normal startup shit like checking RAM etc, and way before windows kicks in, so I am inclined to think it is either vid card or monitor, and I am leaning more towards possibly the vid card as the monitor itself is still receiving a signal, just not the right one.

A normal start up will consist of the monitor coming outta standby, the green light stops flashing on the front, it will display some shit about the vid card and then proceed to run the RAM check etc before windows boots up, at the point when the system finishes it's checks the monitor will switch to standby for a split second and then come back on, I assume changing some settings or loading drivers, but when it is misbehaving it will just switch back to standby mode during the Ram check usually, sometimes a little earlier or a little later.

The most annoying part is that if I simply leave it for a while it will start to work again, possibly a heat problem with the vid card? I do not believe it is a driver issue as it will fail long before it loads the drivers.

The last few times it has happened and I have been present I was doing the following:-

Playing a game
Watching AVI clips
Viewing a couple of webcams

The other times I have not been present so I do not know what it was being used for.

Sorry to drag this up again, and i noticed it is in the wrong section too sorry, but it happened twice in the last 2 days.

Both times it was playing games and running the mule, but I touched nothing and once again it started working again after a couple of hours, same shit as before whereby the monitor would stay on longer each time.

Things I checked this time were:-

Monitor, no strange smells or heat coming from the bastard

Vid card, never touched as it seems to make no diference, no heat

CPU, never touched this either, and it cooled down real quick as always, system still shafted when it had completely cooled

Checked all leads and made sure RAM was seated OK, also used a util to check RAM, no errors

HDD, very hot and performance had degraded, a suspect?

With the HDD it was still warm to the touch after an hour?!?! Does that sound normal? It was very hot right afterwards. It is making no strange noises and I am getting no corrupted files, it is defraged regularly and a disk check shows no errors. I downloaded a util from the manufacturers that checks SMART and also the physical shit blah blah, chucked up nothing either.

When I rebooted this morning I had to move a 700 meg AVI from 1 partition to another and it took 7 minutes!!!!!!! normally uinder 2 I would say. I have been to my my mobo manufacturers website and grabbed the latest via hyperion drivers they recommend and installed, and then retested transfer speed for a large file, hey presto back to normal. Could it possibly just have been something went wrong with the last lot of VIA drivers that were on there?

:edit: Also just remembered, I had a snes emulator running and it had a demo running with music, when I came back in and found the monitor off the music had stopped, so perhaps the PC had rebooted?

could poss be the via drivers got corrupted as there is an agp driver installed by it. wot OS U using as if 2k or xp check the system log in event viewer 2 C if reboot happened/unexpectedly (if U havent already done so, it might also show errors that might be helpful in working out wot the actual prob is)

I forgot to check LOL Has been OK so far tho. Next time it happens, if it happens, I will check the logs.