Video keeps turning off

I was hoping some of the genius folks on this board can give me a clue on what is going on with my computer. I have an older Gateway machine with an AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-core processer running Vista Home Premium. The graphics board is a Nvidia GeForce 9800GT. My keyboard is a Merc Stealth (it has lit-up keys and game controls).

It seems to run fine for a while, and then suddenly the monitor shows "Monitor going to sleep" and the screen goes blank (just as if I had turned off the power to the computer but left it going for the monitor). The monitor has a power light on showing that it is still getting power, but no signal -- the power button glows orange. Additionally, and this is the odd part, the keyboard stays lit, but when I press on the Num Lock or Caps Lock key, the light does not go on or off . . . it just stays at the same status as it was before (it has little red lights to show status).

I can't see anything to tell if the mouse or anthing else is working. The only way to change this that I have found is to hard-boot the computer. It boots up pretty slowly (the kids have loaded a lot of junk on this computer over the years). Sometimes when I do that and let it start up on its own, I come back 30 min or an hour later to find that the computer again has a black screen. Other times, my daughter or I may be in the middle of a CoH session when the screen goes black.

It started this behavior two weeks ago, went on for a couple of days and then stopped. It worked fine for almost two weeks, but just started this up again this weekend. I ran Malwarebytes and have a subscription to Trend Micro Antivirus running on the machine.

The machine is old enough where it probably should be replaced soon, but I really don't want to spend that quite yet. And I don't want to spend the time setting up a new machine . . . it takes a lot of hours I don't want to spend right now.

At first I thought it might be the graphics board until I realized that the keyboard was being affected. I thought it might be a virus, but haven't found anything. Any ideas?

it sounds like your computer is locking up.

This indicates a hardware issue, likely due to excessive heat.

Change the Nvidia graphics card out if you can and see if the problem persists.

Thanks for the suggestion. Hmm. I haven't checked for dust build-up, and that may be an issue. This is the second 9800 GT card I have had in this computer. Fortunately, the first was covered by a warranty. That warranty/service contract may have expired by now.

The main reason I didn't think it was heat was that it would have the same issues even if the computer had been turned off for a while. It takes about 30-60 min for it repeat the same behaviour, though, so heat could certainly build up in that time.

Does your mobo have a monitor plug-in? Try without your graphics card (monitor to mobo instead of monitor to graphics/graphics to mobo) to see if that's the culprit. (It may require an adapter from DVI to VGA, or something else, but those are cheap)

Quote:

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What os are you running? It could be any number oug things. I'll post more when I get home.

Have you checked the windows error log?

I actually have NOT updated the drivers . . . I tried to a couple of months ago, and it caused the system to crash. So I dumped the new driver and let Windows find a driver . . . it loaded the old one and didn't seem to have any problems since then (except CoH says I need to update my drivers).

My OS is Vista Home. I hate updating the OS on an old computer -- done it several times over the years and I have always had a problem. I just wait until I get a new machine to get a new OS.

Tried running it again tonight. First I opened up the case and used some compressed air to blow out dust, then tried running it. Booted up OK, but was slow loading virus updates. Finally finished booting and updating after about 10 min. I checked out a web site and was watching some video clips when the screen did the same trick . . . monitor goes to sleep, keyboard won't change status . . . but I could continue to hear the sound of the video clip for another minute after the screen went black. (The clip ended.) From when I turned on the CPU to when the screen went black, it took 25 min.

I haven't tried switching to the on-board graphics on the motherboard yet. It just takes so long to try each thing and then re-boot.

It did not seem to be hot . . . I keep this tower on top of a table and not on the floor, and it has a fair amount of air around it.

It really sounds like a vid card failure; I've had one fail and give similar symptoms before. Yes, the vid card can easily lock the computer up when it fails. What you're describing doesn't sound like it's CPU related; that usually results in a hard crash, usually to the BIOS screen or a total shutdown.

Check to make sure the vid card fan is spinning; if you've good ventilation you may be getting enough ambient cooling that the card takes awhile to cook. By the way, when you blow out a fan with a can of air make sure you stop the fan from spinning... freely spinning the fan can be a bad thing. First the fan acts like a generator sending current down the line and second you can really mess up the fan bearings.

I'd suggest popping the side cover, powering up the machine and after checking that the fans spin leave the cover off until it locks up... then see if the video card is hot. (Carefully!)

Have you recently had warmer temperatures in your area? If it was on the ragged edge of thermal failure before that could push it over the top.

If it is the vid card and money is tight this could work for you. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1421792

I haven't taken the time to really mess around with the machine, but just like last time, it has stopped having the problem after 3 days. Seems to be working fine now.

Weird. The only thing I did was blow out the dust and run some virus scans.

I'd check the powersave settings in control panel - this sound like the computer is entering sleep or hibernate mode but not being able to come back up rather than a hardware problem.