[Dragon]

I finally got settled in after moving all around the country for training, and I got my old Computer out and brought it to the barracks to use for movies and what not. After a good 30 minutes of me doing things such as resetting J51, and finally removing the CMOS Battery (which I deduce is uh.. in need of replacement) It fired up. Drives spun fans kicked on, CCLs, everything.
The thing worked fine when I shut it down in march, and I'm pretty sure I kicked it on in June with no problems, but now I'm getting some wierd stuff on the monitor that looks alot like what you'd see if you tried to play a blank VHS tape; thick dark lines slowly scrolling upward.
Now, I was forced to swap out the monitor for an EMachine LCD, which freakin tiny, but my CRT was much too large to tote 500 miles, and it was ready to go anyway. SO, upon settin the thing up in the barracks I discovered that this new (old) monitor doesn't use a conventional power cable! lucky for me I had a 12.2 DC adapter that fit it perfectly and seemed by all standards to work effectively, and may actually be the power cable for the monitor (but I don't know).
The system is running an NF7 MoBo, which gives the "OK" POST beep, and also the tell-tale "you are entering CMOS" beep when I hit the delete key, but as i said, I can't see a damn thing I'm doing. Of Course, the fact that I can hear the beep would lead me to believe everything else is functioning as normal. I've got the monitor plugged into VGA1 on my 9600xt all-in-ancient-wonder, although I tried VGA2 with precisely the same results. the wierd VHS-looking lines, and then standby mode for the monitor, as though there was no signal.

The monitor works perfectly fine to my knowledge, although I haven't used it in sometime, It was from a computer set up for my mother, an Emachine (!!!!), which we put a larger monitor on. So the one I brought down is basically in out-of-the-box condition, albeit a year or two old. I thouroghly inspected the video card, re-seated etc, and it seems just fine, no bent pins, nothing. Moreover I never really messed with my hardware much, as all I have really used it for in years was watching The Office and listening to music.

I'm about 90% that it is one of a few things:

The video card somehow went bad, and POST hasn't picked up on it because the card is still powering up. OR
The monitor is a POS (moore than a normal Emachine Monitor) or I did in fact use the wrong power source for it. OR
The unit itself simply has nothing to display, and for whatever reason, POST isn't picking up on any hardware issues.

Anyway, that's my story. Any help would be much appreciated.