Vista - Problem with monitor blinking

My monitor will blink randomly, and usually come right back on, but sometimes it will be off for 10 secs or more.

Hardware:

umm... not sure about the motherboard, I'm not at home. But it has PCIe, DDR3, Socket 775
550W PSU (came with the case, not sure what exactly...)
Intel Q6600 Quad Core
Corsair 6GB DDR3 RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX hooked up via HDMI to a 32" HDTV.

Now, the only thing that has changed is the mobo and ram. I haven't updated the BIOS on the mobo yet, but I suspect that may be the issue. I have the latest drivers and updates for vista.

Anyone had problems with a blinking screen before? I've been told it may be that the video card is overheating... that's not it, because this happens under no load at all.

I've also heard it could be the PSU, but I had no problems like this for 4 months before I replaced the MOBO and RAM.

I appreciate any help.

To the top.... any ideas?

The same thing started happening on my laptop just yesterday and was concerned my Nvidia card was headed south on me.

I looked at what I had installed and started going backwards uninstalling or disabling services and utilities until it would stop. (Before I had done this, I rebooted into the safe mode to see if the problem went away. It did. that told me it was software related and not hardware)

Nonetheles, I uninstalled Adobe Flashplayer and as soon as it was uninstalled, the video off and on blinking stopped.

It would seem to me that a large corporation like Adobe would not screw up with x64 operating systems. They want big bucks but they're realy, really, bad about staying on top of things.

I believe CS3 has serious issues with Vista x64, too!

Give that a shot. I bet you'll be fine after its uninstalled.

Cheers!

I am not 100% sure but I doubt you have DDR3 RAM if you are using a LG775 CPU and board but, let's skip that for a moment and tell me this:

Go to Device Manager and tell us what you have under Monitors. If you have something like "Generic Pnp Monitor", you need to update your drivers as this may be a problem.

While under Device Manager, also check under Display Adapters, write down what you have and double click on it, go to the Drivers Tab and give us the Version and Date of your video driver... chances are they are outdated.

Hi!

We have a similar problem. Here is a little history.

All the workstations in our company have a dual monitor setup. Most are equipped with nVidia Quadro FX 4500 or 4600 and 21" or 24" monitors connected using DVI-I (a few have larger size monitors, like 30", 40" or 52"). We deployed 64-bit Windows Vista SP1 around March 2008 with the driver available at that time: 169.39 WHQL (2008-02-22). At that time and until recently, everything was fine, display-wise. The only annoyance was that the nView utility was not available.

Around November 2008, we deployed a new batch of computers. Of course, the latest drivers were used: 178.26 WHQL (2008-10-15). Suddenly, we started having a wave of blinking monitors. I troubleshooted the problem and found that the blinking seemed to start after Windows awakened the monitors from sleep state (after system went to sleep, or simply at power on if the monitors were left on power save during the night). I found that disabling the affected monitor in Windows display properties and enabling it back right away made the blinking stop temporarily (not turning the monitor off and back on, this has absolutely no effect). Preventing Windows from putting the monitors to sleep also reduced the recurrence of the blinking during the workday. However, every morning, I had to run through the company to disable/re-enable the monitors everywhere a new computer had been placed.

This lasted a few weeks. As they became available, I tried newer driver versions, up to 182.08 WHQL (2009-02-26). But no luck, the blinking stayed. Then I noticed I got the blinking on the "older" computers as well if I updated the nVidia driver there too. This only affected computers with an FX 4600 installed, not those with an FX 4500. With monitors from the "Eizo" brand, we get blinking. With monitors from the brand "Dell", instead of blinking, we get artifacts. This is especially noticeable on vertical lines: they "tremble", as if looked at through hot air (like on roads in hot summers, or mirages in the desert, if you see what I mean). With monitors from the brand "Samsung", we also get artifacts, but usually more like colored pixels running in lines along the edges of the monitors.

The symptoms are different according to the brand of the monitors (blinking or artifacts) but they are always caused by the newer versions of the driver. Disabling/re-enabling the affected monitor always stops the problem temporarily. So far the only solution I have found is to install an older version of the driver. In my case, driver 169.39 WHQL (2008-02-22) and earlier versions do not have the problem; driver 178.26 WHQL (2008-10-15) and all newer versions up to 182.08 (2009-02-26) have the problem. I did not have any version available between 169.39 and 178.26 to test, so I can't tell for sure for those in between.

I hope this information can be useful to others (and maybe prevent them from wasting as much time as we did on the problem). I haven't tried uninstalling the Adobe Flash Player. It is true it has been updated as well between the two deployments.

Alexandre

Hello Alexandre Siriu,

Welcome to the Vista Forums.

Thank you for the information.

Enjoy,
Gary

By the way, here is a reference to the same problem on another forum:
With 180.48 driver, screen continually blinks on vista login screen - NVIDIA Forums

Hi Alex,

Do you get the same problem if you use 2 monitors of same make and model on a single PC, or doesn't it matter?

We always have two monitors of the exact same make and model hooked to the computers. I have not tried with different monitors (could be interesting, though).

The problem (blinking or artifacts) only happens on one of the monitors at a time, but not always the same.

Hi Alex,

There is a new driver available: Quadro Release 182