Blackout On Monitor

[lefty1953]

My friends PC has just locked up twice in the last 2 days. First time his wife was playing Spider Solitaire when the screen just went black and nothing would turn it off other than the 8 second power button. Second time she was on Map Quest typing and it did the same thing. I am thinking either the power supply is going bad or it is just dirty inside causing a heat problem. It is an older E-machines with about a 800Mhz CPU. Nothing added to the machine lately and no power outages going on. Just all of a sudden started this. Any other ideas? Thanks in advance.

[TheTerrorist_75]

Besides bad power supply or heat due to dust buildup I would say to check Device Manager for video problems. The driver may be corrupted or the video (onboard?) is going bad.

[bozodog]

I know this may be redundant.... But have they ever done a defrag? Emptied temps and cookies? IMHO XP likes a clean house. And of course, ANY hard shutdown can corrupt a driver. (or anything for that matter)

[lefty1953]

Besides bad power supply or heat due to dust buildup I would say to check Device Manager for video problems. The driver may be corrupted or the video (onboard?) is going bad.

Thanks for the reply, I will call him today and have his wife check out the driver. He wont touch the PC.

And Bozodog, they don't install any games they just use what came with the PC. Defrag isn't necessary, but I will have them dump the cookies and temp files while I have them on the phone. They live in Denver and I live on the Western Slope of Colorado or I wouldn't have had to post a message. I can usually fix a PC if it is in front of me, but it's not as easy when I can't tinker with it.

[Dragon]

Besides bad power supply or heat due to dust buildup I would say to check Device Manager for video problems. The driver may be corrupted or the video (onboard?) is going bad.

Thanks for the reply, I will call him today and have his wife check out the driver. He wont touch the PC.

And Bozodog, they don't install any games they just use what came with the PC. Defrag isn't necessary, but I will have them dump the cookies and temp files while I have them on the phone. They live in Denver and I live on the Western Slope of Colorado or I wouldn't have had to post a message. I can usually fix a PC if it is in front of me, but it's not as easy when I can't tinker with it.

even if they don't download games on the system, it's still a good idea to run defrag. Games aren't the only thing they use it for i presume. anytime they install or download something, pictures, videos, write documents etc.. it still can fragment the info. it's the nature of Windows.

Even MS recommends defragging the hard drive once a month.

[Tootsdog9]

Besides bad power supply or heat due to dust buildup I would say to check Device Manager for video problems. The driver may be corrupted or the video (onboard?) is going bad.

Thanks for the reply, I will call him today and have his wife check out the driver. He wont touch the PC.

And Bozodog, they don't install any games they just use what came with the PC. Defrag isn't necessary, but I will have them dump the cookies and temp files while I have them on the phone. They live in Denver and I live on the Western Slope of Colorado or I wouldn't have had to post a message. I can usually fix a PC if it is in front of me, but it's not as easy when I can't tinker with it.

even if they don't download games on the system, it's still a good idea to run defrag. Games aren't the only thing they use it for i presume. anytime they install or download something, pictures, videos, write documents etc.. it still can fragment the info. it's the nature of Windows.

Even MS recommends defragging the hard drive once a month.

Agreed, I would also recommend a chkdsk before that defrag. It can't hurt and could help. I would also recommend doing the defrag in safe mode.

[lefty1953]

Besides bad power supply or heat due to dust buildup I would say to check Device Manager for video problems. The driver may be corrupted or the video (onboard?) is going bad.

Thanks for the reply, I will call him today and have his wife check out the driver. He wont touch the PC.

And Bozodog, they don't install any games they just use what came with the PC. Defrag isn't necessary, but I will have them dump the cookies and temp files while I have them on the phone. They live in Denver and I live on the Western Slope of Colorado or I wouldn't have had to post a message. I can usually fix a PC if it is in front of me, but it's not as easy when I can't tinker with it.

Well when I said it wasn't necessary I meant they never install anything and if they have pictures on the PC they came from with an e-mail which they don't get often. A check disk was already run as they restarted the PC after the crash. This has Windows Me on it and so it showed them as not shutting down properly and it ran Scan disk on the drive while it rebooted.I haven't heard from them since yesterday.

[iccaros]

defrag is nessary even if you never install anything, or deleate a file or add new files. the poor implamenation of the microsoft swap file along with jurnalizing only to increace search speed, and to protect the file system struture not the files.. means that for no good reason the drive will be fragmented. get fragmented enough and you have programes time out while looking for information.. this caues programes to hold memory they should not and you can get random crashes..