Monitor Won't Receive Signal! Please Help...

How's it goin, guys? Super noobalicious here, just warning you. I have a Dell Dimension 8100 that I pulled out of my garage to fix up a little. Here are the basic specs for it, as I cannot get more specific ones thanks to the monitor not wanting to work:

Processor model: Pentium 4
RAM installed: 128 MB
Hard drive size: 40 GB
Graphics processor: nVidia GeForce2 Ultra
Graphics RAM: 64 MB
Graphics card: nVidia GeForce2 Ultra
Operating system: Windows XP


The monitor is a ViewSonic ViewPanel VG150. I found a 15 pin cable for it, plugged it in, and it was working fine. I installed a new cd drive, tried turning it on again, and the monitor would only display "No Signal". I messed with cable, and after a while it was working again. Today, I turned it on, it waqs working, then quickly flashed some message in DOS and the monitor lost signal. I have messed the with cable to no avail. One thing I noticed is that the cable only has 13 pins on both sides. Not sure if that has anything to do with the problem, like I said, noob. Should I just try getting a new cable or what? :cry Please help me out guys, I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance!

 

The obvious things to do would be try A) a new cable and B) another monitor or the same monitor on another PC.

Either you may not have the equipment necessary to try this or it might not help. In that case, I'd suggest making sure your video card is properly seated in the AGP slot inside the computer case. If it appears to be seated properly, I'd say try another card if you can or use the integrated video output if your motherboard has the option.

These are just obvious examples without any diagnosis... It's hard to say where the problem is and we don't want to jump to any conclusions and say that some part of your hardware is malfunctioning...

Just for clarification, when the monitor is hooked up to the PC and you turn the PC on, do you see ANYTHING before it says "No signal?"

 

Thanks for the reply! I just went out and bought a new cable and still no go...so that ain't the problem. I don't have another monitor to test that with at the moment, but I can probably get my hands on one soon enough. The monitor does not show anything at any point, just the no signal box. The video card seems to be seated properly. How do I tell if my motherboard has integrated video output? Thanks again for the reply and help!