Hi, last night my friend came round with his laptop an we watched a film using my monitor. I turned off my computer, unplugged the monitor an plugged it into his laptop, we watched the film fine, he went home. Next day in the morning I went to turn my comuter on, it loaded up until just after the windows xp loading bar and then the monitor goes black and say "no signal" I turned everything off and left it for a min, turned it on and same again. I turned my computer off an on about 7 times. I then used my spare monitor and same again, I tured that on an off about 5 times but still nothing. It was working perfectly fine the night before I unplugged it. We never touched the settings on the computer so there doesn't seem to be any reasonable explanation, it just seems that the computer doesn't like monitors anymore. The computer is only about 2 monthes old, I bought it just after xmas, and its running windows xp media centre edition. Any Help please email me on [email protected]. Many Thanks

Hit "F8" just before the Windows screen appears, to bring up a menu (note. Press "F8" ahead of time; you need to be quick.).

Once you have the menu, choose the option to boot normally with VGA graphics.

Ill try that tonight when I'm at home, do you know what the reason would be for it changing. Many Thanks.

Something else I forgot to mention. Booting with VGA graphics will set the resolution to 640x480. If the desktop comes up, then change the resolution back to what you had before. Reboot. Hopefully it should reset the monitor.

Also, try unplugging the monitor's power cord for a few minutes (assuming you didn't try it in the first place) and see if that helped "reset" the monitor.

By the way, what type of monitor are you using? LCD or CRT?

Do you have 2 video cards? A lot of times, if you have two, and plug the monitor into the onboard card, it will display everything until windows loads, then it will turn off, and the "added" card will take over.

Apparently this happens to several people, however; I only have one solution for those with laptops and an external monitor.

For some god awful reason, the computer will decide that it should suddenly start sending its video input to the laptops screen, instead of the external monitor to which it is usually wired to.

Press Fn and F10 (this key should have a monitor symbol under the letter/digit), until your screen display is returned. This switches your video input in between the external monitor and the laptop's screen. Then right click on the desktop, select properties, select the Settings tab and make sure that your external monitor is marked as the forefront monitor (marked 1) and that your laptop's display is marked as 2. Also, place your cursor above the second screen and make sure that the brief description that pops up says that the monitor is not in use.

Post is 7 months old