Black screen of doom!

[Sui]

Basically, last week my PC started to crash to a black screen for no reason. The first time was while playing Halo, the second time while playing zombie master, the third was while browsing the internet, as was the fourth. The fifth was on boot, and now all I get is a black screen, no matter what I do.

Now, whenever it crashed, it seemed like it was only the monitor that had turned off. So to test this, the 3rd time it went to a black screen, I heard an error message and pressed "print screen". I then alt tabbed into (what I hoped was) paint, pressed "Ctrl-v" then "ctrl-s". I then restarted my PC, opened the image, and it had worked.

I can't find the image (I showed it to people on IRC, but I can't access my Imageshack account) but it was on the lowest cours possible, the lowest resolution, with a blocky message that said something was wrong with my graphics card drivers.

So I uninstalled my drivers, then reinstalled them but to no avail. The next day, Sunday (the awesome day in London!) my PC refused to work. It just showed a black screen. I tried using a different monitor, and this time I got the "DELL" startup message (where you can press F2 to view the bios etc), but then everything went black, and now I don't even get the boot message.

Now- I thought this was obviously a graphics card problem, due to the drivers message and the obvious link between visual display and my card. But I really fecking hope it's not, because whilst everything else in my PC is old + expendable, my card is only a few months old (it's an ATI radeon X700). Evidence to suggest against my card bieng broken is also the lack of artifacts or overheating- normally when graphics cards die, they are 1) put under a lot of pressure and get very hot (I checked mine after the crashed and it was cool), and 2) they display erratic colours called "artifacts". Mine has neither symptoms, it's simply black. The only thing that even suggests it's my graphics card was the error message I received.

One more thing- the red sensor at the bottom of my optical mouse isn’t on. Same with the “hard drive light” on the front of my PC.

Any ideas what the defect could be?

Dell Dimension 2.8ghz, intel processor, 1024mb DDR, ATI radeon X700 etc.

 

[Beerdude26]

Sounds like your motherboard.

It fails to give power to your external equipment (so it seems), so it MIGHT also be the power supply.

Both are important for power transfer. So if it's not those, it's probably the wires

 

[$kelet0r]

Sounds like your motherboard.

It fails to give power to your external equipment (so it seems), so it MIGHT also be the power supply.

Both are important for power transfer. So if it's not those, it's probably the wires

in fact it could be almost anything

but beerdude is likely right, if you are getting a black screen it is more than likely the power source either at the psu or through the motherboard
can't imagine it being a ram problem because you can still boot without ram - to the blue screen of death anyway :E

 

[Sulkdodds]

Your PC has become sentient and has taken your uninstallation of its drivers as an attack. It has taken necessary action to defend itself.

 

[Jimmeh]

I had a similar problem where my monitor started blacking out, and eventually stopped working altogether.

After swapping out various things to see what was up, turned out it was down to some dodgy ram, replacing them sorted them out.