Steven writes in with a hardware question
Q. My Sony monitor is getting power, but it is stuck on sleep mode. I have no picture. I recently installed a new ATI Radeon video card and downloaded some kind of DirectX software. Everything went smoothly and worked immediately. An hour later the monitor went to sleep mode and stayed there! Is this problem because of the video card or the monitor itself? How can I check?
A. If your monitor is in sleep mode (yellow light) that means there is no video signal from the computer. If you restart and don't see anything at all then it could be the video card itself or possibly the monitor. If you changed the refresh rate to a mode the monitor can’t handle then you could have damaged the monitor but it’s not too likely. If you have another monitor you can hook it up and test it. You may also want to try to take the video card out and reseat it. If its a PCI card you can try a different PCI slot. If you have your old video card you can put that back in and see if you get any video.
If you see the startup screen that appears before loading Windows then its most likely Windows setting or driver/software issue. If you can get into Safe Mode it will start the computer with a generic driver and allow you to get into Windows and check for problems. You can change video settings or roll back the driver using Device Manager or even install a new driver. You can also try to uninstall the DirectX software you installed in Safe Mode.
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