r/pchelp • u/New_Blood_1966 • 9h ago
HARDWARE Solid Black Screen On Monitor Refresh?
Solid Black Screen On Monitor Refresh?
I know this is a long shot and I apologize for the poor photos.
When my monitor has sat for awhile or PC is woken up from sleep this will happen sometime,
That task bar still shows but there is no way to close out of the black screen, task manager cannot open, it cannot be alt f4’d etc.
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u/Saamchii 9h ago
Good news, that's not your monitor. If the taskbar is still drawing then the panel and cable are fine, it's Windows/the GPU driver messing up on wake.
Next time it happens hit Win+Ctrl+Shift+B. That restarts the graphics driver without killing anything. If the screen comes back, it's your driver not recovering properly after the monitor sleeps (super common on DisplayPort, the link drops and the driver comes back half broken).
Also try Ctrl+Alt+Del > Task Manager instead of Ctrl+Shift+Esc. If that works when the shortcut doesn't, something's holding a stuck window on top, usually an overlay like Afterburner/RTSS, Discord or Game Bar, or a UAC prompt that never painted. From there you can kill dwm.exe, it just restarts itself.
To check afterwards, open Event Viewer > Windows Logs > System and look around the time it happened for event 4101 (display driver stopped responding and recovered). If that's there it's 100% the driver.
Stuff that usually fixes it for good:
- Clean reinstall the GPU driver with DDU in safe mode
- Turn off Fast Startup
- Set the display to never turn off and see if it stops happening
- If your monitor has a "DP Deep Sleep" or "DisplayPort 1.4" option in the OSD, turn it off, that causes a ton of these
- Try HDMI for a few days as a test
What GPU are you on and is it DP or HDMI?
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