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Dual monitors crashing system

Washoe

Washoe

Senior member
System specs:

eVGA 6800GT PCIe
Athlon 64 3500
Foxconn nForce4 Ultra mobo
1G PC4000 GeIL Dual Channel RAM
250GB WD sata-150 hdd
Thermaltake case w/420 watt psu

A friend's WinXP system keeps freezing up and we're not sure why. Every 5-10 minutes this happens, even just browsing the internet. He brought it over to my place to test out and we were able to run it fine for a few hours, even running Sandra benchmark/stress test without a single crash. Temps remained steady and no signs of heat or psu problems. Drivers look good. Device Mgr does not indicate any conflicts or problems. We ran Windows Update and it's all up to date.

The only difference in our setups is that he runs a dual monitor config at home, using 2 Hyundai L90D+ LCDs (both DVI connections) while over at my place we used 1 Dell 2005FPW, again through DVI. Yesterday though, he tried connecting just 1 monitor into his system at home, and it did not crash once - he was even able to play HL2 for a couple hours without a problem. The really weird thing is that the system does crash with 2 monitors, even when 1 is turned off.

Does this make any sense? How can dual monitors freeze up a system even when 1 of them is turned off? Something faulty with the video card? A short or something?
 
Even if it's turned off - the resistances are still probably different than if it wasn't plugged in. The card just might be jacked.
 
Have him try it with each monitor seperataly, and see if it only happens with one of the monitors. Then if it crashes with one, and not with the other, move the cable from the one that wasn't working to the one that was. Try both DVI ports seperatly as well. Pretty odd problem. What mode is he using when he is running dual monitors? Could be driver related, could be the video card, could be one of the cables or monitors, not really sure why that would happen though.
 
Remove the drivers for the monitors in the control panel, then restart the computer with one attached. Allow windows to update the driver. Then shut down and attach the other and allow the driver to be loaded.
 
Thanks for the advice and comments. We'll try your suggestions out and see what happens. I have a feeling that aGreenAgent is right about the differing resistances when both are plugged in. Possibly some short in the card. One thing we didn't do was try using dual monitors over at my place - something we should have thought of at the time, looking back.
 
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