Monitor Weirdness. Ghosts in the machine? (1 Viewer)

[John Watson]

Ghosts in the machine?

I've become inured to "spontaneous" loss or corruption, or unwitting modification of desired but invisible settings, that make my limited computing life far less than perfect.

But in the last few hours, the weirdest ever happened.

Came home yesterday, and found the image on one terminal had moved slightly to one side of the screen, and it was flickering, something wrong with the refresh rate I presumed. The other computer in the house had no problem.

Well, I couldn't find what to adjust under Display under Control Panel, and the onscreen adjustments required using incomprehensible glyphs, that only stayed on screen for a couple of seconds. I was able to use it to re-center the display, but the Hz setting controls were incomprehensible.(too short a time to see the impact of any adjustments, or even to understand how to make selections.)

Tried inserting the cd that came with the monitor (guess I had let the computer set it up when I bought this monitor a few months ago.) Got a warning that if something didn't work, I'd have to go back to safe mode! Anyway, proceeded and got a message that a file was missing, and it couldn't be done.

Decided I had to work with the flicker til I could get a more computer literate person to look at the problem.

But this morning, the flicker had gone!!!

Did the operating system (ME) spontaneously correct something over night? Is there a patron saint of computers?

 

[BradyB]

I may be wrong in assuming this, but your problem may be as simple as a power fluxuation. if you had turned your monitor OFF when you went out and the computer restarted itself, Microsoft can not detect a monitor type so it defaults to 800 x 600, which could account for the moving of the monitor picture, and default so some horrible refresh rate, which account for the flickering.

In this case all you have to do is restart the computer and microsoft should fix itself.

I hope I havn't made too many assumptions and I hope this helps.