I have an old eMachine T3092 desktop, which I am very attached to for sentimental reasons. Have had it since 2005 and it has been a bastion of performance and reliability. That said, about three weeks ago I began to be plagued with this issue. It first manifested when I placed my system in Standby. Upon resume, the monitor remained in standby until shutdown with the power button. So I began using Hibernate instead. That worked fine for awhile, and then presented the same problem. And then it got worse; my system would not signal the monitor on power up, or with a reboot, just a black screen. Well I scoured the Internet forums on the issue (of which there were numerous) for a solution. And there were many suggestions, and much advice. When I finally got my issue resolved I thought I would post this to help others that maybe having a similar issue.

I began my quest to resolve the problem by first replacing the power supply unit. Aside from the motherboard, the CD and DVD drive(s), it was one of the last remaining OEM components left on my system after recent upgrades. My initial thought was that it might be failing, and when it did it was certain to take the motherboard with it. I ordered a replacement, and installed when it arrived. But it did not solve the problem. I then turned my focus to the graphics card which I'd installed last year. I removed it, then connected the monitor to the on-board graphics connector. There was sporadic success with the monitor being signaled on Startup there. Bear in mind that after installing the new AGP graphics card I had removed the driver for the on-board component. I suspected at that point that the video/graphics card was failing. I contacted EVGA, the manufacturer, and told them of my findings. As it was still under warranty, they promptly sent me a replacement. I installed when it arrived. I also temporarily removed the CMOS battery, and on bootup went into Bios to configure any errors there. My problem was now 95% contained. But I still had an intermittent problem with the signal not reaching the monitor with a Restart, after installing a new program, for example. I was a little stymied there. Back to the forums I went. I found a suggestion to completely uninstall the video card driver, and then install the newest driver available for the video card. I did that, and happily it brought me to the end of this particular quest.

If you are having a similar issue, hopefully this could be of help to you.

© 2012 Tony Arthur