Jacob has a higher-end gaming PC. Not top of the line, but certainly higher than the mid-range. Great graphics card, decent memory and speed, and a nice curved large monitor.

He comes down to see me yesterday afternoon and says, “Umm…my monitor stopped working.” Huh? Yep, he rebooted, did all the basic stuff, nothing. No signal to the monitor.

At the time, I was working my real job, so no time for much in the way of tech support. I gave him three possibilities:

1. Full shut down, see if the PC has somehow lost its setup info;

2. Try the monitor with a different source;

3. Try a different monitor.

He comes back later to say that the existing monitor works with another laptop, no problem, and the PC itself doesn’t work on other monitors. Excellent, we’ve narrowed it down to the PC. Right???? RIGHT???? Monitor works, PC doesn’t.

Now, there were some confounding variables to add to the mix. He’d been running a new game, and the refresh rate was dead slow. He had tried playing with graphics settings, downloaded a tool from AMD, and after that, nope.

I was initially worried he had fallen for some sort of scam pop-up, but it was indeed all legit. And nothing sounded like it should have screwed up too much, but maybe he lost his graphics drivers. My brain couldn’t decide if the PC would still send a proper video signal if the drivers weren’t on it, but I was wondering if maybe the graphics card went pffft.

I popped over to Canada Computers, where we bought it, and they weren’t busy so I said, “Hey, I might have the easiest fix ever. I think he just blew off the drivers.” Which the guy told me wouldn’t matter. It would still send the basic signal, even if only BIOS info. Huh.

He reached over to his computer for checking things in, unplugged the video feed and plugged it into the PC, added power, and voila, Jacob’s login came up. So, the PC **was** working. Just not with Jacob’s monitor. Or any monitor at the house. Huh?

We chatted about a few other things, but nothing that would give me a lead anywhere. But it was working.

So brought it all back home, plugged in again, nada. No signal to his monitor. We did have a small problem with Windows not being still registered, but apparently unrelated. Huh.

Jacob went off to have a bath, I started noodling. I literally couldn’t think of anything. Then it occurred to me that while we had shut the PC down to “nothing”, we had NOT reset the monitor, and it IS a smarter-than-average monitor. It has some internal memory, auto config stuff, etc. And since it plugs directly into the powerbar, not the PC, it is always “on” at least somewhat.

What if I shut it down too to fully off? I turned off the power bar and let everything go to zero. Nothing on, nothing running, etc., and let it stay off for about 5 minutes.

Then, I turned it all back on, started the PC…and got Jacob’s login on the screen, no problem. After his bath, Jacob reenabled the proper graphics drivers, tested all his normal games, and they all work. The “problem” one still didn’t, but we’ll deal with that on the weekend. The rest is running fine.

I’d love to say I’m a god for figuring out how to reset it, but well, all I really did was turn it off completely before turning it back on. Exactly what we tried multiple times, but as I said, the monitor was staying on and remembering that it didn’t like the previous signal from the PC and thus continuing to block it.

I can’t say I was looking to solve a hardware problem last night. But all’s well that fixes itself.