Weird problem - screen just goes black!

[Dodge777]

Hey all,

Having a weird problem on pc. Whilst in windows xp, the screen fairly often just goes black - sometimes this will be 10 minutes after start-up or 2 hours. No blue screen of death or anything. Just black. It tends to do this randomly, but before this started happening, there were problems when I tried to play video. If you played video in full screen, chances are that it would freeze straight away and I'd have to reset. Even if not in full screen, i.e. playing a video link on the BBC website for example would sometimes crash it.

I'm not really sure what's going on but I'm guess it's some kind of graphics card failure if it's struggling with video? It's not the monitor as this is a fairly new monitor and the video problem was happening with the old mointor as well.

Anyone have any ideas? Cheers.

 

[mp260767]

have you tried different drivers ?

run dxdiag see if it runs through it ok.

 

[Dodge777]

Right... the latest update. My PC couldn't even get into windows this afternoon. As soon as the logon screen would come up, the screen would go all distorted for a few seconds and then the computer would beep and restart.

So I went into safe mode and uninstalled the display driver. Now I can get back into windows. I then tried installing the latest catalyst drivers and the problem returned.

So clearly there's some sort of a problem with the graphics card/display drivers. What do I do? Does that mean I probably have to replace the graphics card?