Monitor Trouble

I have a Dell CRT monitor and a Geforce GT 610 graphics card. The monitor is behaving strangely and I am not sure whether I need to change the graphics card altogether, clean the dust out of the PC tower, or replace the monitor. After I boot the PC, I have to push the power button on the monitor on and off several times before the monitor comes on, and even then, it could be gray, or dark green, or something else. Then I turn the monitor on and off some more until the normal home desktop/taskbar appears, and usually it will be extra dark or extra bright. At this point I either go to Youtube or Facebook to play a video, which seems to “wake up” the monitor or the graphics card. Then I “sleep” the PC for a few seconds, and then I wake it up, and usually the color will be correct after that. Sometimes the menu buttons on the monitor work, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes if I push one the monitor turns black or gray.

This has been going on for several months, with intermittent periods where there was no trouble at all. Now, however, the monitor is needing more power-button pushing to show any signs of life, and I want to solve the problem for good, if I can, with my relatively low budget. Any suggestions are appreciated!

Try the monitor on a different pc to test. If it works normally then you know its something with the pc. If you don't have another pc to try it on then ask a friend to try it on theirs. If I had to guess, its probably the monitor but it also could be a bad video card.

I tried my PC with a different old monitor and it worked properly, so I guess this is a monitor problem!

Thanks for your reply!