No Video

No video

When you turn the computer on, the screen is supposed to show you words, pictures, or marks, or at least a cursor (little line). If the screen stays completely black, probably your monitor is getting no electricity or no electrical signals.

Make sure the monitor is turned on. Make sure its two cables (to the power and to the computer’s video card) are both plugged in tight (since they can easily come loose.) Make sure the monitor’s contrast and brightness are turned up (by fiddling with the knobs or buttons on the monitor’s front, back, or sides).

If the monitor has a power-on light, check whether that light is glowing. (If the monitor doesn’t have a power-on light, peek through the monitor’s air vents and check whether anything inside glows). If you don’t see any glow, the monitor isn’t getting any power (because the on-off button is in the wrong position, or the power cable is loose, or the monitor is broken). If the monitor is indeed broken, do not open the monitor, which contains high voltages even when turned off; instead, return the monitor to your dealer.

If you’ve fiddled with the knobs and cables, and the power-on light (or inside light) is glowing but the screen is still blank, boot up the computer again, and look at the screen carefully: maybe a message did flash on the screen quickly?

If a message did appear, fix whatever problem the message talks about. (If the message was too fast for you to read, boot up again and quickly hit the PAUSE key as soon as the message appears, then press ENTER when you finish reading the message.)

If the message appears but does not mention a problem, you’re in the middle of a program that has crashed (stopped working), so the fault lies in software mentioned in CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT or COMMAND.COM or some other software involved in booting; to explore further, put into drive A your DOS disk (or Windows emergency recovery start-up boot disk) and reboot.

If absolutely no message appears on the screen during the booting process, so that the screen is entirely blank, check the lights on the computer (maybe the computer is turned off or broken) and recheck the cables that go to the monitor.

If you still have no luck, the fault is probably in the video card inside the computer, though it might be on the motherboard or in the middle of the video cable that goes from the video card to the monitor.

At this point, before you run out and buy new hardware, try swapping with a friend whose computer has the same kind of video as yours (for example, you both have VGA): try swapping monitors, then video cables, then video cards, while making notes about which combinations work, until you finally discover which piece of hardware is causing the failure. Then replace that hardware, and you’re done!