Bizarre Monitor Settings Problem (1 Viewer)

[Kevin_Graham]

I gave my old P3 600mhz computer to my mom over the weekend. After hooking it up to her monitor I could see that the settings for her monitor were way off. The Windows desktop appeared as though the screen area was set to 1280 x 1024 when in fact it was set to 1024 x 768. So I bumped it down to 800 x 600 and this now gave the appearance of 1024 x 768. The other problem is that the Windows image does not fill the screen. I tried using the controls on the monitor which would allow me to fill the screen horizontally but even with a maximum adjustment the vertical portion was still off by 3". I uninstalled the monitor driver and allowed XP to assign a new driver but this made no difference. The monitor is a low-end generic brand that Mom bought last year when her other one died.

The video card is an AOpen GeForce2 I believe. What am I missing?

 

[DaveF]

The Windows desktop appeared as though the screen area was set to 1280 x 1024 when in fact it was set to 1024 x 768

What do you mean by that? Was it actually using a resolution different from what you had specified? Or was the screen compressed into a smaller region in the center of the monitor? Or were the fonts, icons, etc. smaller than you expected?

I've not used Win XP, but with Win98, I would uninstall the monitor drivers, and tell Windows to use a generic VGA 640x480 monitor driver. Then reboot and make sure it's working. If so, then see if there are Windows drivers specifically for this monitor make and model. If not, then probably use one of the generic display drivers for the desired resolution.

If none of that works, it may be the monitor has problems. You could connect it to a different computer and see if it behaves differently.

 

[Ken Chan]

I would guess that the cheap monitor is not syncing correctly. Does Windows recognize it as a "Plug and Play" monitor?

Does that particular flavor of GeForce card provide any good monitor info/adjustments, specifically vertical and horizontal frequency? Vertical frequency is in the neighborhood of 50Hz, 60Hz, 70Hz; horizontal is like 50kHz.

I had what seems like a similar problem just a few days ago. I use a KVM (keyboard video mouse) switch, and the monitor was switched to another computer when I booted. So the card did not detect the monitor correctly, and it ran the video mode (1152x864) at only 43Hz; the picture was shrunken like you describe. A simple restart of Windows (without rebooting) fixed it.

//Ken