What cable do I need?

Hello. I'm on my laptop right now. My desktop won't turn on. Last night, the screen was flickering like a mofo. This morning, it would just spontaneously cut to blback and force me to restart the whole computer. Now, it cuts to black as soon as I turn on the power! It will briefly show the initial "Gigabyte" screen before going straight to black.

If I press buttons on the monitor while the computer is turned off, it will clearly say "in power save mode." So it doesn't appear that the monitor itself is the problem. It's most likely either the cable or the video card.

If it's the card, I at least know what to buy as a replacement and don't need your help with that. I hope it's the cable since that would be the cheapest to replace.

I used a Dell monitor (don't know any other specs, thouh, and i can't go into the desktop to check) and an Nvidia Geforce GTX 750TI video card. What sort of cable would I need to buy to replace my current one?

EDIT: I just took out the cable that connected the vid card & the monitor. I can now confirm that, of the three cable ports my graphics card had, I was previously using this blue one:

My computer monitor also use the same port. The cable had the sae interface on both ends.

So which cable is that? It almost looks like VGA, but I could have sworn that this graphics card wasn't supposed to have a VGA port because that port is so damn old.

Edited by stebbinsd, 11 April 2017 - 09:36 AM.

I suspect a dying video card based upon the described symptoms.  If the machine remains powered up then it's not the power supply.

However, it could be the monitor itself going bad, too.  I'd certainly try hooking up another monitor (even if you have to borrow one "for a couple of minutes" from someone you know) to see if the behavior with that monitor is the same.

I have very, very seldom seen cables go bad unless they are subject to amounts of movement and abuse that are not at all characteristic of the typical monitor cable which tends to sit in the same place, undisturbed,  after having been hooked up and just gathers some dust back there.

...after having been hooked up and just gathers some dust back there.

I've added a new image to help you tell exactly what cable I need.

That's a VGA port.  They're still incredibly common and are about the only alternative to HDMI these days.   VGA has survived over the long term where most things that came between it and HDMI have long since passed from the scene.

I suspect a dying video card based upon the described symptoms.  If the machine remains powered up then it's not the power supply.

My motherboard has its own basic graphics card on it. I know this because the computer will automatically use it if I don't have the right Nvidia drivers.

Is there any way I can get the computer to switch to that more basic video card, just to see if that solves the problem? Then I'll know for a fact that it's the graphics card that needs replacing.

Well, you could pull the graphics card.

If what you say is so then the computer has to have another VGA port that is independent of the one on the graphics card.  On most desktops I've dealt with pulling a card is a far easier affair than reconfiguring system settings for this sort of thing.

New update. I screwed the cable back into the desktop and I tried to turn it on again. By wiggling the monitor around and even lifting it off the desk, I was able to get the screen to come back on for a split second only to go black again.

I was able to do this several times, but I was never able to get the screen to stay on for longer than a second.

Do you think this lends credence to it being the cable and not the card?

Perhaps, but the easiest way to test this out would be to grab an alternative monitor with an alternative cable, both of which are known to be working, and you have all of the variables you need to determine exactly which component is likely to be the culprit.

This is an instance where borrowing before buying if you have the ability to do so makes the most sense.  And that's regardless of what the root cause turns out to be because this lets you figure things out in one fell swoop.

Perhaps, but the easiest way to test this out would be to grab an alternative monitor with an alternative cable, both of which are known to be working, and you have all of the variables you need to determine exactly which component is likely to be the culprit.

 

This is an instance where borrowing before buying if you have the ability to do so makes the most sense.  And that's regardless of what the root cause turns out to be because this lets you figure things out in one fell swoop.

I don't have any replacements.

I have an idea. My laptop has a VGA port in the back. Maybe I could plug my desktop into it and use its screen.

I highly doubt  it will just be plug-and-play. Once I hook the cable up, how do I program the laptop to display what the desktop tower is processing, rather than the laptop?

I that fixes the problem, then we know it's the monitor.

But how do I do that?

EDIT: And before you say anything .... yes, I have tried doing a google search or how too do that. However, most results I find only provide instructions on how to turn my laptop into a second monitor. These search results all rest on the assumption that I can see what I a doing in the desktop. So they don't help me.

Edited by stebbinsd, 12 April 2017 - 04:21 AM.

Your laptop VGA port is an OUTPUT only - you cannot use a laptop as a monitor - BUT you can plug your monitor into your laptop & see if that works OK - in which case you would find out whether the monitor & cable are OK.

So is that just plug and play? I take the VGA cable fro the back of the tower and screw it into the  back of the laptop and POOF, the desktop monitor should light up like a Christmas tree?

Ok, either it's NOT plug and play, or you're a damn liar. Because I just screwed the VGA cable into the back of the laptop, and nothing happened on the desktop.