I have a 4 year old Dell 386 desktop system. Yesterday the monitor suddenly went "gray". I can still see images - I'm using it now to write this - but dark colors continue across the screen and everything is "dimmed." How do I tell if the monitor or the video card (nvidia GE Force 2 MX) or the motherboard is bad? I have replaced the video card drivers with no effect.

Swap out the vid card and if nothing then try a different monitor.

You could try the contrast/brightness controls on the monitor..

Thanks for your suggestions.

Dell Dimension 8100..PATENT GUY

Hi, I'm having the exact same problem...Did you figure out what it is? My monitor is fine so mine is an inside problem. Please help!!!

ugh, I've been messing around for about a week now with my own problem
First the screen started doing lines across the screen. My first thought is my $1000 19 inch lcd display was a piece of junk. To fix the problem temporarily I have changed the monitor settings to brighten it up.Now my 3d games and applications are starting to act up. And without errror messages.( and I have a debug version as a programmer in directX )

I tryed reinstalling and updating the monitor drivers...
I tryed reinstalling the video drivers.
I even thought maybe reinstalling the directX may solve the problem to retail, and back to debug version, and the dx utility shows no indication of problems.. other then the tests itself show incorrectly..
That started getting me thinking more... We have an extra computer in the house. so I hooked my monitor to that... and it worked wonderfuly, not a single problem

With checking all these, the only thing left is the video card itself.( geforce2 GTS )
I've seen many posts that say to attempt a reset of the card. I will problably do that sometime today but it's not looking to promising. Even still it will give me a chance to clean out all the dirt.

maybe this information will be of use to others with a simular problem.

hey man i have an old dell monitor too and my monitor showed the colors with all different tints of blue. What i did was i twisted the end of the wire that connects to tower from the monitor until the colors were back to normal and while twisting the wire sometimes the colors where red or gray too..so i dun know if this will help but it doesnt hurt to try.

I also have the same monitor problem - horizaltal lines and poor contrast. I also tried changing the monitor but had the same problem. Gateway suggested updating the driver but that did not help either. I'm now at a loss.
Dave.

How does one reset the video card????
Dave