Screen goes black--what happened???

[Dan Mitchell]

I have an 1100 athlon w/2 hdd's, the main one running win2k. Last night the pc was sitting for several hours dl'ing from 2 p2p sites (winmx & soulseek) over my cable connection. I approached it after about 1 hour of unattended operation, and the screen was black. No response to anything (keyboard, mouse, ctrl/alt/del, etc., etc.) Turned the pc off, rebooted into scandisk as win2k will do, and recovered two small files (each 32k) which upon opening in a text editor were unrecognizable. Ran a virus scan, nothing found, machine now seems fine. This has never happened with any pc I have owned, I'm wondering what happened. Needless to say, my 1st suspicion was some meddling via the p2p connection(s). Soulseek especially is new & unique in that it allows you to directly browse other users share directories. My machine is behind a Norton Internet Security firewall. Any ideas?

Dan

[mjc]

Are you sure power management for the monitor is not set to something like 1 hr....if it is it will blank the monitor and send it to standby mode, if PnP.

[Dan Mitchell]

MJC-Thanks for the reply. The monitor does turn off after 20 minutes, but this wasn't the situation. In fact, when I walked up to the pc & noted the monitor was black, but that the monitor power-on led was green, I knew there was a problem (usually it's yellow when the monitor is auto-off'ed). Also the other power profile options (turn of HDD's, system standby & hibernate) are all disabled. It was definately daadn (Dead as a Door Nail :( )

Dan