Monitor Start-up Issue

[Robster16]

I am trying to isolate the cause of the following issue, upon booting my desktop up the monitor (21" MultiSync) the power LED cycles from green to amber indicating a loss of signal/voltage. When I power the PC and monitor down and wait for the amber LED on the monitor to go dark and boot it up for a second time, the LED status stays at steady state green and I get video.

Another symptom is that I have to adjust the date/time of the system when it reboots (usually from January 2004).

Any ideas?

[ronallandottk]

It may need some more looking into, but my best guess is that your CMOS battery needs replacing. The giveaway is the fact that you always have to reset your PC's time/date, indicating that the CMOS gets cleared everytime you reboot. As to how a faulty CMOS battery can affect your monitor, I would surmise, that as the CMOS settings get erased everytime you power down, a BIOS setting which remembers which video adapter to initialize on bootup gets erased as well.

First of all, replace your battery, which is probably a CR2032 button cell or something similar.

Then, enter your BIOS settings and look for something called "INIT DISPLAY" and set it up appropriately depending on what video card you use. Choices are AGP, PCI, or PCIE.

What's probably happening when you boot up is that the PC's BIOS "forgets" which display to initialize (since the battery is weak and therefore CMOS data gets lost at power down) and more or less fails to power up your video card, making the monitor think there's no signal and thus prompting it turn to enter standby mode. On reboot it defaults to factory settings and your monitor works fine. Powered off for a length of time and it forgets again, and the cycle repeats itself.

It's possible your motherboard has built in video and it defaults to that every time you reboot.

Hope this helps somewhat.