Shorty Posted January 31, 2008 Posted January 31, 2008 My parents have bought a brand new PC, but the monitor is just showing a 'signal lost' message. I know this tends to happen when the PC isn't feeding anything to the monitor , or when it's trying to output in a resolution the monitor doesn't support, but I can't understand why that would be the case with a brand new computer... Unfortunately I can't check that they've done everything right (parents, eh?) because all I can do is listen over the phone. And unfortunately it's quite hard to solve hardware issues over the phone. I had them plug in my old tv/monitor instead and that also lost the signal straight away by the sounds of things. From what I can tell over the phone, the BIOS appears briefly before the signal disappears. The comp's brand new, this is the first time they've ever tried to start it up. There's no Windows disk with it apparently, so I assume it must be pre-installed. Anyone got any ideas I can throw their way?
Caris Posted January 31, 2008 Posted January 31, 2008 Have they got both a DVI and VGA cable? If so have they tried both?
McPhee Posted January 31, 2008 Posted January 31, 2008 I get the same thing if i plug my monitor in to the VGA port on my motherboard rather than the one on the graphics card. It could be that?
Shorty Posted January 31, 2008 Author Posted January 31, 2008 oh yeah! damn --that was the problem. I guess for me it would be so natural to plug it into the video card that i didn't imagine my Dad would've done otherwise. Thanks, I completely forgot about that other port
McPhee Posted January 31, 2008 Posted January 31, 2008 No probs, i fess up that the only reason i knew was because i did it myself when i build this machine I was all like WTF! My new comp is broken?
Tekki Posted February 1, 2008 Posted February 1, 2008 Hehe I work in "Tech Support" and a customer once rang in with a problem like that. PC World upgraded 3 of his computers. 1 with new ram 2 with new ram and graphics card. The two with the new graphics card boots straight to no signal. It seems common that people will plug it into the usual slot cause they're so used to it or they don't know that upgrading from integrated to an agp/pci/pci-e one that they'll have to plug it in there. Of course, I advised him to locate the lower connector and it works
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