My monitor wigged out!

[Gig-O-Ram]

Something odd happened when I powered on today. I had turned the comp on, but did not turn my monitor on right away. When I powered up the monitor, my display was barely discernable. My new wallpaper I just made looked like a bad painting, and when I checked the display properties, the window and taskbar looked like they stepped out of an early version of Windows. The color quality showed only as lowest (4 bit color), resolution was at 640x480 and neither could be changed; there was also a lot of artifacting.

I thought my video card went out on me, but fortunately, a restart solved the problem, even though the reboot took longer than normal. I'm still using the 93.71 driver, and generally have no issues. My DPI is set on 96, and my refresh rate is set on 85Hz and color is on 32 bit. I'm gonna keep an eye on this to see if it continues.

[gvblake22]

WOW, that is very strange for sure. I feel like I had a similar thing happen to me once, but I can't remember because I think a similar simple solution solved the problem. I would point my finger at Windows being dumb, then the video card second (if Windows wasn't the problem). If your monitor was bad, it probably wouldn't display anything at all.

[Gig-O-Ram]

Well, when I turned everything on just a little while ago, everything was fine. So you may be right that Windows was probably being weird. I know right after I put up my new wallpaper (a wicked 1024x768 thing I did of my Mustang), the display blanked out for a couple seconds after I turned it on, but then it was fine. My video card - even for all the cooling I have in my case and the Zalman video cooler - is still generally the single hottest running piece of hardware I have. It takes a lot of abuse.

[Pete]

Zalman video cooler... I think I found the culprit. j/p Those guys are really cool guys. no pun intended...

Since you got it when you started up, I would check software conflicts, or virus. Also adware.

[Panda Man]

Last time I had this happen it was actually because the driver failed and the default VGA driver was loaded in its place.

Originally Posted by Gig-O-Ram

the display blanked out for a couple seconds after I turned it on, but then it was fine.

And that sounds like a driver resetting right after booting to finish being installed (which its supposed to do). It's probably a one time thing, but I would reinstall the drivers just to be sure.

[Gig-O-Ram]

Well, it has been a little while since I've run any adware or virus scans, so that'll be something to do when I get some free time (almost ready to do my move, you know). And I've never reinstalled the driver, so maybe that's something I can take care of after everything settles down.

When the problem first occured, I got this message that said "Image quality can be increased by changing the resolution and color depth..." I'm thinking, DUH!