Nividia GeForce 8200M G Monitor randomly goes blank

[HaggisCat]

I take it then that the screen is still randomly blacking out ?

[lolita1962]

no it isnt but i dont know if it will happen again u see i mentioned that it happened just 3 times and at different times so i cant tell now if it will stop happening or not. but thanks for ur help. now what do u think?

[HaggisCat]

I think time will tell if the driver I gave you will solve your problem. Sometimes with intermittent issues like this, all there is to do is wait and see.

 Sorry, but that's all I have. 

 No one else was answering your thread, so I thought that I would give it a try and installing a new driver is usually the best way to go here.

[lolita1962]

yes i guess we shall wait and see. but what if it happens again then what do u suggest?

thanks alot for ur responses.

[HaggisCat]

If it does it again, then send me a PM with this thread attached, but as I said, that's pretty much all I have.

 If you assume that a virus has done some damage to the registry in the OS, then that can cause the problems that you are (were) having. Installing the driver may fix this or has fixed it.

 A couple of other things is to reinstall the OS from the recovery partition, but at this point I don't want to do that. That would be a nuke and pave solution.

 The hard drive may be failing.

 Go to "Backup and Restore" and in the left column "Create a system repair disc" and "Create a system Image"

Also, go to the recovery manager and create your recovery DVD's of the recovery partition. All this should have been done when the laptop was new.

 In all cases use Sony DVD+R.

Make sure and back up all your personal items such as photos and documents, even if nothing goes wrong with your machine, it's always a good idea to do this in case something  dose happen.

 I think less then 1% of the people ever do this.

 New computers don't last as long as the old ones, I still have my 10 year old IBM desktop and the only reason why I don't use it anymore is that it's incredibly out of date. It has a 16 GB hard drive and 512 MB of RAM. It's quite useless in that respect.

[lolita1962]

i have made CD backups when i first purchased this laptop 2 years ago and i also have the recovery partition so if i need to use that at any time to reformat its available. and yes i have made backup to all my docs and pics no worry about that.

well lets hope this wont happen again as i was going to do the formatting in any case so when i got this solution from u, im going to wait and see hopefully that will solve the issue. i dont believe its a virus, i have norton internet security which is a good protection.

[HaggisCat]

No antivirus protection is full proof. Two ways that viruses can get in are through e-mails and the internet.

 Infected e-mails are usually easy to spot, they have titles like "I Love You" or re Chen Shi. I received a fishing one from Paypall.com the other day and the word Paypal was spelled with two letter "L". This was the dead give away.

 The other way a computer can get infected is through a search engine such as Google. All of a sudden you will get this prompt that your computer has become infected and that you are to click on the link to scan your system, clicking on the link will certainly infect your machine, but in most cases it's already to late. The page it self will have infected your computer, nothing will happen at first. It may take days or weeks for the problem to manifest itself.

 No anti virus software will catch this sort of infection.

 Norton is not the best as everyone uses it and it's the most common. The people who develop the viruses know this and they spend a great deal of time hacking Norton to get by it's security features.

[lolita1962]

u r right of course. still i didnt receive emails like that but sometimes i do receive suspicious emails with links and they r all sent to spam mail i dont click on any link which is suspicious. anyway what r the symptoms of infected pc? is this problem with monitor blankng out one of them or r there others which should accompany this problem to tell me im infected? at least shouldnt the antivirus when it scans tells me that im infected?

[HaggisCat]

The symptoms from a virus attack can manifest itself as almost anything, such as yours. I just mentioned it as possibility for another plausible explanation.

 I thought it worth pointing out as it may start you thinking in another direction.

 If you scan the laptop for an intrusion it may or may not find anything. This is so because by that time the infection has already altered the registry files and corrupted them. In your case it may be your video driver and installing the new one may have repaired it by replacing the old driver.

 This is all hypothetical, you have to realize that there are thousands of registry files in the OS alone and any one of them can become corrupted for any reason, a virus attack is one them.

 The other is software or hardware conflicts, while this may not corrupt the registry, it can cause conflicts that cause problems.

 Installing a new driver is one of the first plans of action to correct things, the other is to perform a Windows restore and take the computer back to a point where things were working. Doing a Windows restore point only affects the OS registry files and leaves your personal items in tact.

[lolita1962]

thanks so much for all ur support. i will wait and see although the system restore isnt working in my pc for some time as i tried to do that few times before, somehow i was told that it didnt work. anyhow if the installation of the new driver didnt solve the problem i will do the formatting of the pc. thanks again for ur kindness.