Question GeForce GTS 250, monitor goes blank

[m610]

I've had this problem for a while and I finally want to get to the bottom of it.

I have a GeForce GTS 250 in a Win 7 system, and every now and then, when it is on but I'm not using it, the screen will go blank. The first time this happened I replaced that card with another, same model. It happened with that board, too.

I figured out that if I unplugged that video cable from the card, and plugged it into the second video-out connector, I had video again. I figured the card must be swapping monitors all on it's own. Then one time I simply unplugged the cable and plugged it back into the same port, and I had video again.

The best I can figure is the card thinks my monitor was turned off and it switched to the second monitor, except I have only one monitor.

Any idea what is going on?

And, is there a keyboard shortcut that will let me switch back to my monitor?

Thanks in advance, Mike

P.S. This does not appear to be a screen-saver issue.

 

[BFG-9000]

Sounds like your monitor just isn't recognizing when the card has woken up. Try instead power cycling the monitor when this happens.

 

[m610]

Sounds like your monitor just isn't recognizing when the card has woken up. Try instead power cycling the monitor when this happens.

Thank you. I have tried that.

 

[BFG-9000]

Back in the Fermi days, it was common for some nVidia drivers to occasionally break things like waking from sleep, so you would temporarily have to say, disable sleep and use hibernate only. However back then they also fixed such issues pretty quickly and usually the very next driver would fix them (but could break other things...).

Tesla is from 2008 and a generation older than Fermi, so the latest driver was 342.01 from 2016 and you shouldn't expect anything newer 9 years later. However you could always try older.

2016 was not a good year for nVidia drivers, with many like 364.51-364.72 causing severe issues, but at least those didn't get pulled like 196.75 drivers from 2010 for burning up and killing primarily G92 cards like your GTS 250. And to add insult to injury, at the time ATI drivers were quite good.