Bad graphics card or monitor?

I keep my computer on 24 hours a day and when I'm not using it, I turn the monitor off. This morning, I got up and turned the monitor on like I normally do and when I did I got a black screen with the green light on the monitor blinking. I restarted the computer with the restart button and it was still blinking on the I guess bios screen you would call it? The black screen stuff with the system info and things that show up before windows... Anyway I managed to get the monitor to come on when I powered down the computer completely and then powered up again. It was like nothing happened. I thought this might be a monitor problem, except when I unplugged it from the graphics card the words "no signal" popped up and I could read it just fine. Anyone have any idea as to what might be the problem? It's a LCD Viewsonic VX922. Graphics card is Geforce 8800 GTS. Windows Vista.

Vista sometimes puts itself in sleep mode and cant wake up the graphics card... ive had it a few times with different nvidia cards. Hopefully will be ironed out.

It's definitely booting to windows. You can hear it when it does. I have all the power saving options turned off and I double checked. After doing more google searching, it seems to be a problem with the specific monitor with the suggested solution to get an RMA. Except mine is 2 years old and I don't have the box or receipt any more.

try your monitor on a known working system, and the same with your rig plug a different known working monitor into it. that will get rid of the monitor problem.

then do the same with the graphics card if the monitor is not the problem.

dont mess with the software til u know that the hardware is not the problem.