Help please: Monitor suddenly much darker
 

Hi guys,

If anybody can help me with the following issue, I would greatly appreciate it. This is not strictly a Linux issue, but I strongly believe it is a hardware issue, and I have previously gotten excellent help from this board once before, so I'll try again.

I have a dual boot machine (RH 8.0 and WinXP).

A few hours ago, I happened to be playing Combat Flight Simulator 2 on WinXP. All of a sudden, during one of the major screen refreshes (e.g., the beginning of a new mission), I noticed that my screen suddenly got *much darker*. To make a long story short, even once I exited CFS2 and rebooted my machine, the display still appears much darker.

When I reboot into Linux even, everything that is displayed is still extremely dark.

I don't think this is any kind of software/driver issue, because if it were, I would expect this problem to only manifest itself in WinXP, since the two OSs utilize a completely different set of drivers, correct?

So, the likeliest explanation, I think, may be a monitor or graphics card problem.

Since the problem simply seems to be a display brightness issue, I am inclined to believe the monitor is more likely the problem than the graphics card (but I could be wrong).

I've tried checking all my monitor settings and de-gaussing it and all that usual stuff. (The best that I have been able to do so far is turn the brightness way up from 30 to 100 so that I can at least somewhat dimly view my text as I am typing this right now.)

My question is this:
Can anybody please recommend how I might diagnose what the problem may be here?

My suspicion is that I may have simply experienced a fairly serious terminal degradation in my monitor performance.

But how can I be sure?

Can anybody recommend a way to determine if my monitor is, in fact, the problem here?

Is there any way my graphics card could have a failure of some kind resulting in this behavior? Is there any way my graphics card might perhaps need to be reset at the hardware level to restore my display to normal?

[I have fairly extensively researched this topic on groups.google.com, but I haven't been able to find much in the way of definitive information applicable to my situation.]

If anybody would happen to have any pointers on how to proceed in this situation, I would *greatly appreciate it*. I pretty much need to use my computer, and right now it is just borderline usable.

Thanks very much, in advance, for any help or suggestions anybody may have.

aethereal

Well it does sound like a monitor issue more then anything else. I guess you don't have another monitor laying around to test this theory. I had a monitor that I got off someone real cheaply but it was a lot darker then normal. Trying all the usual settings didn't help any so I decided to open it up. And inside where two black knobs that could be turned with a screwdriver. I played around with those and it turned out that one of them was actually some kind of brightness. Turning it all the way up would make the screen totally white. Well I adjusted it and the monitor has been working fine ever since. It was a Philips monitor by the way.

I don't want to advise you to do the same because playing with monitors while they are on can be very dangerous. The high voltages can seriously injure or even kill you. Even when they are not on they still store a lot of electricity.

I just finished posting about my monitor doing the same thing after installing a new video card.

I hooked up a second monitor, and it was the right brightness, which meant that my good monitor had just gone out somehow :(

My suggestion to you is to hook up a second monitor (maybe a friend has one they will let you borrow for a test, or you can get one pretty cheap at some used computer store - if you don't want to spend the money to get a new one), or take yours into a computer repair store to see if they can determine what is wrong.