External display flashing! Help please!

Hey everyone, hope you can provide a bit of help here!

Basically, my notebook has had no problems at all (just so you know, it's a Dell Vostro 1720 with a 512MB NVIDIA 9600M GS), and I had a spare LCD monitor lying around (Samsung SyncMaster 913N, which has served me well for years before I left for university), so I thought I'd try extending displays.

It worked fine for a few days, and all was good - I even updated drivers to the recent 257.21 release, and everything was still fine. Then, randomly one day, the external feed messes up - the picture stays mainly black, and the image of the extended desktop flashes up every few seconds, then goes to black again (as if the monitor is losing signal intermittently).

I rolled back to the previous NVIDIA drivers, and the problem was still there...but the strange part is, when trying to figure things out in safe mode, the external monitor displayed the main and only image, and was absolutely fine and normal - this also applied when scanning through BIOS settings for anything, so it's definitely not a hardware issue (at least I think it isn't!).

However, when booting into full Windows 7 (Home Premium, all updates applied), the issue crops up again! I've also tried it with an AC adaptor plugged in and on battery, still the same. I can't even duplicate displays or use the external display as a main, as the issue still occurs...I'm guessing it's a setting issue or something driver based, but I just can't figure it out - I've tried reinstalls, DriverCleaner to make sure everything fully works out, but no use.

Any help with the situation would be much appreciated!! If you need any additional information regarding the setup, let me know

Thanks once again!

 

Hey mate, i've got the exact same issue.

did you ever manage to figure out what it was?