Woke up to a no display problem. Yikes!

Today I woke up in the morning and went to the kitchen to plug in the kettle to boil water. On the way through, I turned on the PC. When I came back, the screen was black. It wasn't strange at all. Being obsessed with power consumption, I had set up the monitor to go into standby after a minute of idleness. So I thought it was the reason why the screen was off. I moved the mouse to bring the display back on. It didn't resume. I thought I didn't move the mouse enough, so moved it vigorously. The display didn't come back on even then. Something was seriously wrong with the PC.

So I hit the reset button, like everyone would do at such a situation. The screen displayed an unexpected thing. The text at the POST screen was large. So was the text on Windows 8 boot animation. But as soon as it entered the desktop, the display went into standby and displayed no signal error on screen.

I felt a bit worried. I thought it could be a fault with the video card. I have warranty for few more months, so it wasn't a big deal. I was rather worried about Gayan. His new video card is also made by the same manufacturer: Palit. If there was a problem with my video card, there was a chance that this might happen to his card too. (Perhaps I was overreacting.)


Anyways, I kept my calm even though it was unbearably cold. The heater had not been on for long. The room temperature was around 12C.


I simply disconnected the DVI cable from the video card and plugged into the 2nd DVI port. Nothing happened. The display was showing "no signal". Then I plugged the cable back to the same old DVI port and hit reset button again. This time, the screen came back to normal. Fonts were back to the original size.

I really don't understand how it got fixed. But it did. Glad I didn't have to pull out my hair trying to find a fix or RMA any of the components. But it should have been the video card. Probably plugging the cable to the 2nd port reset some error.