monitor periodically blanks off and on

Hey folks,

I am running a nvidia gt220 video card and dual monitors. The acer monitor blanks out and in periodically. Quite often at times. I believe this is a driver problem. What I am wanting to do is roll back to an older driver. In the nvidia repository I only see the newest one listed and that is the one I am using.

I am thinking the 185 driver is what I have used before without any problems. Really not sure which one it was, but it was an older one. So the question is how can I get back to the older drivers so I can try and see which one it was. Any help would be great.

I can’t assist with the driver rollback, but searching online yielded a number of discussions (acorss different distros) about the Powermizer ‘feature’ being the cause of this problem with recent nvidia drivers.

FWIW, you might like to experiment with some of the solutions discussed here:

NVIDIA Forums > 250m flickering image on Ubuntu 9.10 with drivers 185 through 195

Screen flickering with nvidia on ubuntu

If using openSUSE 11.2, it may mean you have to create xorg.conf first (as root at runlevel 3) with

sax2 -r -m 0=nvidia

in order to implement the xorg.conf-based fixes.

An openSUSE thread dealing with Powermizer tweaking:

NVidia Powermizer - how to tweak ?? - openSUSE Forums

Thanks for the reply deano,

Guess this seems to be a problem that has affected many others. Now I have a few things to try. If I can get any of them to work I will let everyone know.