Monitor goes black for a split second at start up

Hello,

I think I'm having a problem with my gpu and think it may be my driver for it but am unsure. When I boot up windows and I first see the desktop my screen flashes for a second (it goes black for about 1 second and then the desktop becomes visible again.) The driver I have for the graphics card is
Nvidia version 9.18.13.908 dated 1/30/2015. I downloaded it from GeForce and they called it Nvidia graphics driver 309.08

I'm running a Gateway LX6810-01 with Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.34ghz processor, MCP7AM01G1 mobo, xfx gf6800gt gpu, Antec vp450 psu, 6gb RAM pc6400, and running windows vista home premium x64.

I'm not sure what that flash in my screen is all about and it seems to only do it that one time when i restart or boot up my PC. I just got this PC as a hand me down from a buddy and have been restoring it to the best condition I can get it to, but that initial flash is driving me nuts and I really think it's related to the graphics card or driver. This PC doesn't have onboard video and there is not any sort of vga or video hook up that comes off the mobo.. it relies soley on a graphics card that I have plugged in to the pcie slot. Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated.


Regards,

FTPcomrad

Thanks for you reply.

I have updated my machine using windows update in control panel before posting this thread. It took about 90 updates give or take a half dozen to get it fully updated, but it appears to be good there. I went to GeForce and downloaded what appeared to be the latest driver for the gpu but the flash remained. I've played movies since and they run pretty well and look pretty good... so maybe things are ok. Today I am downloading an mmo and will be playing it tomorrow to see how the machine runs it. I'd play it sooner but it appears to be about a 10hr download.

I definitely don't like running Vista, but I don't have a product key for Windows 7 and refuse to use a pirated version... learned my lesson doing that many moons ago. lol, Vista is so bad performance wise and it doesn't look all that much better than XP. Such a fail OS.

Thanks again for the reply, I welcome any feedback.

regards,

FTPcomrad

Started the game today and turned all video options in game down (view distance, character detail, shadows, etc) and I was getting an awesome 7fps, lol. Pretty much unplayable. I went to Nvidia and found the latest driver for a GT440 (another gpu I have in my spare parts) saved that launcher to my desktop and then uninstalled my current graphics driver. Powered down the system and swapped out the xfx gf6800 xt with the gt440 and turned the system back on. This time when I got to the desktop there wasn't that flash... I never lost picture. I decided to let my system chill for about 5mins so it could acclimate itself and then relaunched the game. The video options for the game are still the same as before and now my fps is 30.

I think things look good now, i'm guessing that other card was just not up to par.

I was able to max the game video settings and still run at 30fps, woot! Flash is gone and the video quality is much better... solved.

Thank you.