Please excuse me if this is in the wrong part of the forum, I'm a PC newb, and really not sure where this belongs. Also, apologies for the length!
My PC is about 2 and a half years old, and this problem has never occurred before. In fact, it started yesterday and has happened 3 times within that period. It's seriously beginning to worry me in case it may be a hardware issue.
I've done searches on the symptoms, but this appears to be a problem suffered by old monitors attached to new computers, and not to a system that has been working fine for years.
Okay, when it's happened I have been playing both Sims 3 and SWTOR. On all 3 occasions it has occurred when I'm relatively inactive. This may not be remotely relevant, but twice it's happened as I was in the cockpit of my ship in SWTOR and just waiting for a crafting cooldown. Suddenly my screen goes blank, and I get an 'out of range' message. This requires a hard reboot, and on rebooting I get a 'microsoft has recovered from an unexpected shutdown', but I am guessing that's because I had to manually shut my PC down.
I have tried to auto set my monitor thinking it may be due to wonkiness/resolution issues, and it was advised to someone else on another forum, but to no avail. I also checked my event logs and can't find anything pertaining to it. In fact, the only thing I can find is an acknowledgment that Windows was shutdown unexpectantly, but oddly nothing about the error that caused my monitor to blank out.
My PC was made by Zoostorm, and I have an Intel Q9550 and my graphics card is an ATI HD4870. I do have a slight overheating issue, I think, and the cores of my CPU can reach the 70s. I am looking to purchase a new case, and hopefully a new power unit to go with it, but money is extremely tight at the moment, and so that plan keeps being placed on the backburner.
I do have a spare graphics card luckily (an Nvidia 9800GT), and I'm wondering if the one I am currently using just can't cut it anymore? Unfortunately I don't have a copy of Windows Vista, so I'm praying it's not needed!
I'd appreciate any advice on the issue, and thanks for reading!
My PC is about 2 and a half years old, and this problem has never occurred before. In fact, it started yesterday and has happened 3 times within that period. It's seriously beginning to worry me in case it may be a hardware issue.
I've done searches on the symptoms, but this appears to be a problem suffered by old monitors attached to new computers, and not to a system that has been working fine for years.
Okay, when it's happened I have been playing both Sims 3 and SWTOR. On all 3 occasions it has occurred when I'm relatively inactive. This may not be remotely relevant, but twice it's happened as I was in the cockpit of my ship in SWTOR and just waiting for a crafting cooldown. Suddenly my screen goes blank, and I get an 'out of range' message. This requires a hard reboot, and on rebooting I get a 'microsoft has recovered from an unexpected shutdown', but I am guessing that's because I had to manually shut my PC down.
I have tried to auto set my monitor thinking it may be due to wonkiness/resolution issues, and it was advised to someone else on another forum, but to no avail. I also checked my event logs and can't find anything pertaining to it. In fact, the only thing I can find is an acknowledgment that Windows was shutdown unexpectantly, but oddly nothing about the error that caused my monitor to blank out.
My PC was made by Zoostorm, and I have an Intel Q9550 and my graphics card is an ATI HD4870. I do have a slight overheating issue, I think, and the cores of my CPU can reach the 70s. I am looking to purchase a new case, and hopefully a new power unit to go with it, but money is extremely tight at the moment, and so that plan keeps being placed on the backburner.
I do have a spare graphics card luckily (an Nvidia 9800GT), and I'm wondering if the one I am currently using just can't cut it anymore? Unfortunately I don't have a copy of Windows Vista, so I'm praying it's not needed!
I'd appreciate any advice on the issue, and thanks for reading!