Six months of booting to a black screen because I missed one stupid setting

I spent from January to June this year chasing a black screen issue on my home build. Tried swapping RAM, the GPU, even the power supply. Turns out my monitor was plugged into the motherboard instead of the graphics card the whole time. A customer brought in his PC for a similar problem and I saw him do the same thing by accident. That's when it clicked for me. Anyone else ever spend months on a fix that took two seconds to solve?

3 comments

3 Comments

violaramirez1mo ago

Ha! Yeah that's brutal but I've done dumber. Spent like three months once thinking my PSU was dying cause my PC would randomly shut down under load. Replaced the whole damn thing. Turns out it was just a loose 24-pin connector that wasn't fully snapped in. Wiggled it once and it was fine. That feeling when you finally find it is like a mix of triumph and wanting to punch yourself in the face.

wren6381mo ago

Did you ever have that moment where you stare at the part you just replaced and just whisper "why" to yourself for like five minutes straight? I got a similar feeling when I spent an hour troubleshooting a monitor only to find the power button was just stuck.

murphy.aaron1mo ago

And the worst part is how fast the fix was once you actually saw it. I did almost the exact same thing with a secondary monitor that stayed black for like two weeks until I realized I had it plugged into the wrong HDMI port on the back of the PC. That moment of realization is just the worst because you can't even blame the hardware.