Expert: Keith - 10/26/2009

Question
I recently purchased a used sony lcd color monitor and I have a dell dimension 2400 CPU. The monitor works but goes to a black screen after a few minutes. I can turn it off and back on and it will stay on a few minutes, but then goes off again.

I downloaded the monitor driver but am wondering if it is my video or graphics card. I use windows xp and my graphics card is a integrated intel 3d agp graphics card. I'm not sure what my video card is, though.

I would appreciate any help you can give me, thanks.

Answer
If the monitor driver did not help there are several things you can try.
1. Try the monitor on another computer to see if it does the same thing.
2. Make sure the power settings are not set for the monitor to turn off after a short amount of time. The computer may have changed the settings when you changed monitors.


When the monitor turns off does it have any lights on at all?
The first thing to rule out is if the monitor has something wrong with it. In other words, trying it on another computer will tell if the monitor is bad.
What model # is the monitor?