Weird

Further escapades with my monitor. Left speaker wasn't working after I had had it apart. So decided to replug the audio sockets on the monitor and PC. Heard a crackle, frozen screen no mouse or keyboard. Hard reset, no video input, uh-oh. Can hear hard disk whirring and light coming on as if it's booting.

So in the end had inspiration, try VGA cable instead of DVI. Hey presto logon screen. So popped up to local PC shop and got an MSI 9500GT to replace card in desperate hope it's the card. Messed with drivers and put in 9500 and all works on DVI.

Conclusion some static must have popped the 8500GT DVI port, but VGA fine. Weird.

Trust MSI not to protect CMOS logic with buffers on external connectors.

It was a cheapy no name card that popped, teach me to cut corners, new one is MSI.

Happened to me when I was sloppy with a no-name parallel port adapter. I 'fessed up but the computer shop replaced it without comment.

Well the other thing I have noticed the MSI 9500GT runs 13 degrees cooler than the no name 8500 at default settings and fan at 25% and no noise from the new fan.

I did something similar..

I was trying to get my speakers plugged in to the pc, reached round but missed the sound card.. and stuck the jack in a USB port.. PC turned off instantly. But after a reboot the sound card no longer worked!

Oddly the Plug and play device enmuator drivers got corrupted god knows how that happened by shorting a usb socket lol