Question : Problem: Second monitor dark

One of our employee's has dual screen. One of her monitors has suddenly become very dark, you can see windows on it but its too dark to read any text or see where the mouse is. The other monitor is fine.

This happened first a couple of months ago. I thought it was an old monitor problem, switching the monitor seemed to solve it.

Then last week it happened again. I switched the vga cables over to confirm it wasn't the monitor at fault so I changed the graphics card. This again seemed to solve the problem.

Then this morning the employee turned on her pc to find the problem had reappeared. Having replaced the monitor and graphics card already (and drivers since new graphics card required new drivers) I don't know what else it could be.


Not sure if this helps but I did find an error in the system error log for last night...
Event Type:      Error
Event Source:      ati2mtag
Event Category:      DAL
Event ID:      43029
Date:            07/04/2009
Time:            16:49:53
User:            N/A
Computer:      XP473
Description:
Display is not active
Data:
0000: 00 00 00 00 01 00 5a 00   ......Z.
0008: 2a 00 00 00 15 a8 00 c0   *....¨.À
0010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ........
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ........
0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ........



Your help would be much appreciated, thankyou in advance.

HP dx2200M
Win XP Pro v.2002 SP3
Pent4 3.00 GHz, 512MB RAM
Current graphics card: ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro, driver version 8.493.0.0

Answer : Problem: Second monitor dark

The first incident was the backlight or inverter of the LCD monitor going out.  The second sounds like one port on the video card went out.  If both were a few years old, this would not be surprising, as parts do fail.  The third incident may indicate you have a power problem with the outlet the monitor is plugged into, or it could have been the main cause all along and blew the monitor and the video card.  In this case, you should get an electrician to look at the outlet.