Second Monitor Gets Bright, and then Blank

Question

I recently added a second LCD monitor to my home-computer. It was working fine for the first couple of days, but then it started having problems. Every 10-20 minutes it would get really bright, and then instantly go black. The power was still connected, so it wasn't turned off. If I turned the power off for a few minutes, I could turn it back on and get another 10-20 minutes of work done before it would happen again. What could cause this behavior?

Answer 1

I'm not sure what specifically took place, but swapping the monitors on the video-card itself seemed to have remedied the problem (I also lowered my brightness on both afterwards). Physically switching each monitor cable to the other video-output on the video-card. After doing this, I think I may have had to re-arrange the monitors in my display-settings to keep my desktop on the left monitor. The action taken in dimming the brightness came after Jeff Atwood mentioned running his monitors at around 30% brightness.

Answer 2

It could be that the power supply inside of the monitor is starting to malfunction.

One of the usual causes is failing capacitors, or poor solder joints.

The monitor I'm using right now, is one from the junk-yard, all I had to do was replace most of the capacitors, and it works perfectly.