TFT going to standby

[MarkK]

Wonder if any of you guys can help with a problem I'm having with a PC I recently upgraded for a friend.

The PC is a Compaq Presario (not sure of the model). I reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled Windows XP, put in another 512Mb of memory and stuck a Geforce MX440 in the AGP slot. I switched the primary graphics adaptor BIOS setting to AGP slot and plugged my monitor into the graphics card. All the drivers installed fine, display worked perfectly etc...

She took the PC back down south were she lives and set it up with her own monitor which is a Dell E151FP TFT (I didn't know she had a TFT when I reinstalled the software). She finds that when she starts the PC with the TFT plugged in it displays the BIOS and the Windows XP boot screen but then the TFT goes into standby mode. I've been helping her over the phone and we can get into Windows VGA mode - I supplied her with the Dell driver for the monitor but no matter what we try it won't work outside of VGA mode. I've tried uninstalling the monitor completely and restarting but it gives the same result everytime. Unfortunately she has no other monitor to try it with.

Is it possible that windows is switching back to the onboard graphics adaptor? Has anybody experienced this before or have any ideas?

Any help would be much apprecoated otherwise I'm going to have a long drive to sort this out!

[unrealuniverse]

i don't think windows would switch but you could always try plugging the monitor into the onboard graphics. If you carn't because its a DVI port it needs then i cannot help you.

Another point to try is moving the connector round to see if its a loose connection. hope this helps

[MarkK]

Thanks for replying.

It's just a standard RGB connection so I'll get her to swap ports when it goes to standby to see if it makes any difference. They may have also found a CRT they can try with it as well.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks
Mark

[JimmyBoy]

on my old pc, it has an onboard gfx, n pluggin any monitor into the new gfx i put in it would mean the monitor would stay in standby, baffled me until by chance i tuerned the speakers on and the 'lets setup windows xp' music was playin (was clean install) so iknew it was the gfx

plugged it into the old 1, then went into device manager, disabled the onboard, rebooted with the monitor plugged into the new card, has been fine ever since

[Timmy!!!]

I believe it is a refresh rate problem. LCD screens require a low refresh rate - usually a maximum of 75Hz. If the graphics card is set at a higher refresh rate then the LCD screen will turn off to protect itself.

The way to fix this is to plug in a crt monitor capable of higher refresh rates, and once windows has loaded, change the refresh rate to 60Hz. Restart and plug in the LCD and everything should work great.

Hope this helps.

[MarkK]

Thanks for all the suggestions guys - I'm going to give them a try next time I speak to her.

Much appreciated.

[herulach]

Id say either resolution or refresh rate, tell her to hold F8 while booting and it shoudl load windows at 640x480 60hz, at which point she can change the res back to whatever, id guess 1024x768 60hz, but youd have to check it.

[MarkK]

Just thought I'd post the solution to my particular problem in case it helps anyone else.

Turns out that the driver software for the graphics card was picking the TV output as the default device - so as soon as windows was starting it switched to the TV out port. I discovered this by plugging my CRT into the card which didn't work either, so as a last resort plugged the TV in and up popped the windows screen. Went into the drivers menu, selected the Dell TFT as the default device and up it popped on the TFT!

How annoying that it took 5 minutes to sort once I was sat in front of the PC when I'd spent hours trying to sort it out over the phone!

Thanks to all that took the time to reply.