[TheList] A question for the (computer) geeks

Thu Apr 29 10:50:38 AEST 2010

I'd like a second opinion please to see if I'm thinking along the right 
lines :-)

My mother's computer runs 3 LCD screens - 2 on a display card and one on 
the motherboard video.

The report I got from her was that one of the monitors that runs on the 
display card went blank a few days ago.  A few hours later after a 
reboot it came on again.  Soon after that it went blank and stayed blank.

I went round and found that windows could see all three monitors and in 
fact the dead one was working, just with no backlighting. So we plugged 
a different monitor onto the existing cables and all was well until 
about half an hour after I'd left then that one went down too.  This 
time windows could only see two monitors, it was properly dead.

I've been round there again and have worked out that we can swap any of 
our monitors between the video card VGA or the motherboard VGA and 
they're fine, but when we try the same monitors on the the video card 
DVI output they get no signal and aren't detected. Even the monitor with 
no backlighting works fine (apart from the lighting) on the other outputs.

What I'm thinking is that the DVI output on the video card is fried and 
it took the backlighting on the monitor out with it, and that this is 
not necessarily caused by a power surge big enough to wake up a surge 
protector, and that a new video card (and monitor) should solve things.

Sound right ?

The screen that lost the backlighting is nothing flash and not worth 
spending much money on, is that likely to be as simple as replacing a 
fuse or is it a bin job ?

Thanks
Gary