A few months ago I bought myself a new computer. Since then the monitor have been occasionally flashing black for a second or so, and I've been looking for - and failing to find - a solution. Will appreciate any help here.

Problem Description

The entire monitor turns black, lasting for about a second, then resumes display as normal. The computer itself continues running as usual. It looks very much how it looks when changing screen resolution. The frequency in which it occurs depends on whether there's anything moving on the monitor or if it's a static screen - flashing is less frequent when the screen is static, but still occurs.

The frequency have slowly increased over the last few months - at the beginning it was every few minutes and only under load (watching videos / playing video games), now it's closer to every second. This suggests a hardware issue, but read below.

Sometimes after the black screen, it won't return to normal, instead turning completely corrupt. In these cases even quitting the application doesn't help, but physically disconnecting and reconnecting the monitor fixes the problem.

In addition, the computer sometimes gets a BSOD, blaming a driver issue for the crash. This suggests a software issue, read more below.

System Information

NVidia GeForce 660 Ti
Core i7
8GB RAM
Windoes 7/8 (see below)