Second monitor keeps on temporarily going black at random

I haven't found a definitive solution. But there is something that may help to live with it.

When the issue starts happening, press Win+Ctrl+Shift+B to force the GPU driver to reset. It may crash some of your open apps so save your work before doing this.

It will stop the issue for a while, until it happens again... But to me it will hardly happen again in the same day if I don't restart the system.

Thanks for this. I tried it yes only stopped for awhile, maybe 3-4 mins.

Another temporary solution, seems to last for hour or so, is disconnecting HDMI plug from laptop and reconnecting. Not sure what this does exactly & how to understand this, but it seems to work for awhile.

Does anyone know why this works and if there's a longer solution to this?

I have suddenly started getting this issue too. I have 3 monitor and 2 of them works just fine but the 3rd one flashes a normal picture for a second then goes to black if i unplug and replug the HDMI.

It seems to show up totally normally in windows 11 but for some reason it doesn't keep a picture.

I have this problem too, or what sounds like the same problem. I have an Acer Concept7D laptop, Windows 10, and when I try and connect it to an external display I get intermittent hanging - I've tried new terminal, new cables, HDMI, display port, updating drivers, sent laptop back to Acer, came back with the same problem. It seems, as someone else mentioned, to be triggered by a movement of the mouse of any type(internal touch screen, external mouse, wacomm tablet). The external screen goes blank - usually black but it could be a colour also, the laptop screen hangs, then resets, and the external display is unavailable until I unplug HDMI cable and reconnect it.

One specific action is when I am using a software package (Inkscape and GIMP for example) when I go to the file menu to save the file, as soon as the cursor moves to the box to enter the filename, the screen goes blank. I put a message on the NVIDIA forum and someone on there had experienced the same problem. He said he manages to fix it by:

doing a clean Windows 10 install, offline,

downloading the NVIDIA drivers prior and installing them when windows was not connected to the internet

not allowing the Microsoft apps and drivers to download during and after install.

I did try this but had to connect to the internet to download my app software, which meant that drivers were automatically installed, so I will have to give it another go. But others might find it useful, If you try it let me know how you get on. I'm building up the energy to do another clean install myself.

Frankly the amount of variables involved and the apparently random nature of this issue make the odds of false positives for "solutions" super high.
Since it happened to me for the first time (more than one year ago) it sometimes kept happening for some days in a row, then it stopped for a couple of months until it happens again with some weird and unexpected frequency. And meanwhile we try so many things to figure it out that when it stops for a longer period it's easy to attribute a wrong solution and share it here on the forums until it happens again couple of months later.

Since the beginning I went through several Windows updates, went back to Win10 then back to 11 again, many Nvidia drivers, removed and installed many software etc... Eventually the issue always get back to haunt me.

Given I also suffers (way more frequently) with the black checkerboard artifacts on chrome/edge which is a very well known issue with Windows/Nvidia compatibility (still not fixed), I strongly believe the blinking screen is just one more of those buried bugs that are not common enough for the developers to care about it.

Frankly the amount of variables involved and the apparently random nature of this issue make the odds of false positives for "solutions" super high.
Since it happened to me for the first time (more than one year ago) it sometimes kept happening for some days in a row, then it stopped for a couple of months until it happens again with some weird and unexpected frequency. And meanwhile we try so many things to figure it out that when it stops for a longer period it's easy to attribute a wrong solution and share it here on the forums until it happens again couple of months later.

Since the beginning I went through several Windows updates, went back to Win10 then back to 11 again, many Nvidia drivers, removed and installed many software etc... Eventually the issue always get back to haunt me.

Given I also suffers (way more frequently) with the black checkerboard artifacts on chrome/edge which is a very well known issue with Windows/Nvidia compatibility (still not fixed), I strongly believe the blinking screen is just one more of those buried bugs that are not common enough for the developers to care about it.

This sounds right. With the variables in software / hardware that we all have and experiencing very similar blinking external screens issue, focusing on what's common between us is the updates, so it's quite possibly a bug they've overlooked.
Riding this out until this issue is common enough for them to provide a fix is likely what we'll have to do.

Until then, the temp fix of removing HDMI cable seems to provide the longest relief for my external blinking screens, so will keep doing this until a more permanent solution is provided by big brother.