How annoying is it that your computer monitor suddenly goes black without any signs beforehand? No matter what you’re doing, working or gaming, it’s really a pain in the rear to be caught off guard, especially when you haven’t the chance to save whatever you were working on.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone. And the good news is, sometimes the monitor black screen problem is not that hard to resolve.

But before we move further to the fixes, we’ll first need to take a step back and look into some of the most common causes of monitors going black, which could be:

  • loose cable connections;
  • unstable power supply to your motherboard;
  • out-of-date drivers;
  • overclocked GPU/CPU; and/or
  • an old battery.

Now, let’s start our troubleshooting based on the reasons listed above one by one.

  1. Check for the cable and ports
  2. Update graphics driver
  3. Turn off overclocking
  4. Replace the old battery

1. Check for the cable and ports

Loosen cable connections can make your monitor lose power supply, which makes it go black suddenly. So, the first thing to do, and the easiest, is to check that the wire is working just fine, i.e. the cable doesn’t wear out, and its power end is tightly inserted into the power port of the monitor and the wall outlet.

If the cable is working fine, the next thing to do is to check the ports on both ends. In other words, you need to check to make sure that the port on the monitor and the port on the power port both work properly.

The easiest way to identify if it’s a problem with the cable or the port would be a new cable. If the new cable works, then there you go, probem fixed.

If the new cable doesn’t work either, the port on the monitor should be at fault. In that case, you’d need to consider buying a new monitor.

2. Update graphics drivers

If your power cables are tightly fit in and the monitor still goes black, one of the first things you should do is to update your graphics driver, since an up-to-date graphics driver always ensures the best performance and fewer bugs.

To update your display card driver, here’s what you can do (please note that the following screenshots are taken on Windows 11, but the instructions work on Windows 10 as well):

  1. On your keyboard, press the Windows key and X at the same time, select Device Manager.
  2. Double-click to expand the category Display adapters. Then right-click your graphic card driver and click Update driver (the name of the device can be different on your computer).
  3. Then click Search automatically for updated driver software.
  4. Wait for Windows to find the latest driver available for you.
  5. When the driver update is done, restart your computer for the change to take effect.
  6. Then check and see if the problem is fixed.

If Windows says that it’s already found the latest driver for you, so no newer drivers are found, then you should consider updating your graphics driver in a different way with the help of Driver Techie.

Its ever-growing driver database allows you to always have access to the latest device drivers that you need. More importantly, Driver Techie simplifies the driver update process, so all it takes is just 3 clicks (for Pro users), and all your drivers are updated.

To use Driver Techie to find you the latest drivers:

  1. Download and install Driver Techie, then launch it.
  2. Click Scan Now.
  3. After the scan, select all the drivers you need to update and click Update All. Then all your drivers will be updated automatically without you having to do anything else.

Please note that Update All is available for Pro subscribers only, otherwise, you can only manually update the driver one at a time. To see how to manually update the drivers one by one, please check this post.

If you’re a Pro user of Driver Techie, and need our technical support to help with the monitor randomly goes black problem, please feel free to contact <support@drivertechie.com>.

3. Turn off overclocking

Some users notice that their monitor goes into black screen when they overclock their CPU. Some computer vendors overcloc their CPU when the device is shipped, so even if you haven’t overclocked your CPU, it’s still worthwhile to get this setting checked, which requires that you boot into BIOS first.

For most computers, you can press the F2, Del, or Esc repeatedly when you see the computer company logo when restarting your computer to boot into BIOS.

But please note that there are different steps for different motherboards, so if you’re not sure how to enter the BIOS for your computer, please refer to your computer manual.

Once you’re in BIOS:

  1. Select the Advanced tab.
  2. Go to Performance.
  3. Look for the Overclocking option and make sure it’s disabled. If it’s enabled, disable it.
  4. Save the settings and exit BIOS by hitting the F10 key. Choose Yes if you’re asked to exit with saving the changes.

4. Replace the old battery

If you’re using a laptop and facing the black screen issue, then you need to check if the battery is too old. The average life of a laptop battery could be 3 years, more or less. If it’s more than 3 years, then consider replacing it with a new one to resolve the black screen issue.