Strange PC boot issue

[nath]

Hiya,

Right - my dad recently bought a cheapo TFT display. Shortly afterwards, he's noticed a very strange problem. Whenever he boots up the pc (be it cold boot or reboot) the display stays blank but you can hear the pc doing the routine (the mother board also speaks "start booting!" or something). The screen stays blank for a bit and then you hear the pc reboot and it starts again. Now this happens about 2-4 times before it reboots for a final time and the screen comes on. Once it comes on, it boots up fine and there are no problems whatsoever.

I can't think of anything that could cause this - checked the connections, made sure they're firmly in place but that's it. The TFT is going through a standard VGA cable, not DVI. I don't know the specific specs of his machine but it's not ancient. P4 2.8ghz, 1gb of RAM, and an nVidia professional 3d graphics card (forget which, it's for 3d-CAD).

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Draylor]

Sounds like the new display is nothing to do with it.

How long is 'a bit' between power on and it rebooting: 2 secs? 10secs? 30 secs?

 

[nath]

I couldn't think of any reason why the new display would be causing it but it has only started since we got the new one. It's generally about 10-20 seconds before it starts rebooting.