[E-66]

Windows XP Pro 32-bit

About a month ago my 3 year old LCD started flickering when coming out of power saving mode. I have the screen saver come on after 5 minutes, and then Windows turns it off after an hour. It flickers rapidly for about 5-8 seconds and then goes black. I hit the reset button on the case and when XP rebooted everything was ok.

After this happened 2-3 times I changed the power saving settings to not turn off the monitor at all, and I physically turned it off myself if I was going to be away for several hours. No change - still does the same thing.

The one thing I haven't done is to leave it on 24/7 and just let the screen saver run. I haven't had any issues when coming back from having the screen saver on. I also put a 'reboot' shortcut in the corner of my desktop that I can click fast when it does this so I don't have to reach down and hit the reset button on the case. When XP reboots everything is fine, and the picture looks as good as it did before this started happening. If it flickered after a reboot I'd assume the monitor was on its last legs, but since it doesn't I thought maybe something else was going on.

So what's the story?

This post has been edited by E-66: 26 February 2013 - 09:31 AM

[bonestonne]

Does your monitor have a standard IEC power cable (three prong like what plugs into the tower) or a separate power brick?

It's possible the voltage regulators are going, and it's causing the CCFL lighting to flicker out of a lack of power. I wouldn't consider this anything to do with the tower, just the monitor.

I would test the monitor with another computer to see how it behaves with that.

[E-66]

It has a standard 3-prong cable. For now I'm going to stick with handling it as I currently am . A daily reboot isn't a big deal. If it gets worse I guess it'll be new monitor time.

[Ponch]

Check for a bios update for your motherboard. I know it sounds odd, but as you state it yourself in the 1st post,

E-66, on 26 February 2013 - 09:29 AM, said:

When XP reboots everything is fine, and the picture looks as good as it did before this started happening. If it flickered after a reboot I'd assume the monitor was on its last legs, but since it doesn't I thought maybe something else was going on.

[E-66]

I never even thought about the BIOS, but I already have the most recent update.

[E-66]

Update on this issue: until last night nothing had changed... it was still randomly flickering sometimes when I manually turned it on. I'd then shut it off, wait 10 seconds, and turn it back on and it'd be fine.

Last night I was out of the room for just a minute, and when I came back in the screen was all black and showed the message you'd see if you turned on a monitor while it wasn't connected to a PC... "no connection detected" or something like that.

The DVI cable was secure, it hasn't been abused or bent, and I'm the only one who uses the PC. Out of frustration I replaced the DVI cable with a VGA one, and I'm typing this message right now, so it worked. Now I'll have to see if the random flickering continues.

With regard to the DVI connection, I'm wondering if the issue is the cable itself, or the interface/internal workings on the monitor or video card. Any thoughts?

[jaclaz]

What you report is "typical" of the power supply progressively failing, usually due to over-stressed or not-good-enough quality capacitors.

Mind you it is not necessarily that , there could be seral other causes, but to verify IF it is that is easy enough, usually failed/failing capacitors are easily identifiable without instruments by checking if their top is bulging and/or in the most severe cases if they leaked some liquid.

See (example):
http://thetechnickel...de#.UYZZnPnLLnE

This kind of failure is so common that there are "specialized" re-sellers that provide speciifc kits of capacitors for a given LCD monitor model.

jaclaz

[puntoMX]

jaclaz, on 05 May 2013 - 07:10 AM, said:

What you report is "typical" of the power supply progressively failing, usually due to over-stressed or not-good-enough quality capacitors.

+1

Seen on Samsung, HP and more screens...

[puntoMX]

jaclaz, on 05 May 2013 - 07:10 AM, said:

What you report is "typical" of the power supply progressively failing, usually due to over-stressed or not-good-enough quality capacitors.

+1

Seen on Samsung, HP and more screens...

[ROTS]

By flickering you mean to say when you exit sleep mode, or turn the computer on?


This happens with a Vista machine I am using. Everytime I switch displays, it flickers like three to four times.

What I assume, this is Vista attempting to aline itself with the attached display devices/device. I have three devices attached to the computer, plus a high end graphics card. It flickers like three times, for the three VGA connectors, and one time for the graphics card. Another assumtion is that I am using an adapter for the graphics card. My Windows 9x and pre-Vista machines does not do this at all, unless I hit the display utility ( the graphics card display devices, settings ).

Again i assume it is Vista checking the display settings, and what is attached to it. It might also reset or go back to the "RGB please plug gerder" screen sometimes.

It also happens when I use "Windows Classic" program in Vista, with a different color setting?