Hi.

Don't completely discount the monitor. I have a pair of Acer AL2120 monitors, about 5 years old, and both of them had died in the last month with more or less identical problems. Essentially, if the video input goes away, the power supply appears to essentially crash, making the monitor reset as if it had been power cycled, then go away in much the way you describe.

One of them sits there blinking it's lights until power cycled, the other one tends to come back to life if the computer is reset, for a while at least. The problems in both cases started out intermittent, and progressed to being there all the time.

Both of them have been faulty before, one with a bad inverter (which was replaced under warranty, nearly three years after I bought the thing), and the other with the same fault as the first one now has, the blinky lights issue. I stripped and repaired the PSU that time, it was a classic case of bad electrolytic capacitors, and it came back to life for a couple of years. I'll have to pull them both off the wall and have another go at the PSU.

It may be that yours is developing a similar problem.

pca