I was typing a Word document when the monitor momentarily went black, then recovered. This happened a couple more times, then, when it came back, the content was all big, similar to how it appears in Safe Mode.
I fiddled around a bit and found that I could not change the screen resolution - the only option was “default monitor” which was a low resolution.
Looking in Device Manager I see the yellow warning icon next to Display Adapters.
So I fiddle some more. I try disabling, then re-enabling. I try to update the driver automatically. I go online and update the driver manually (Nvidia GeForce 8000 series).
I even try System Restore. I still have a low resolutions screen.
Perhaps even stranger, all my bookmarks and stored logins/passwords are gone.
I don’t mind grabbing a new video card if that’s what the problem is. I can’t imagine what else it would be at this point.
No. If the card still works at low res chances are it’s munged up driver or cable. I’ve never heard of a card just losing high res operation as a failure mode. Thats’ not the way a video card fails.
Possibly, but buying a new video card because a video driver is munged up seems excessive. Why not just fully uninstall the video driver suite and start from scratch with a driver re-install? Does the MB have on board video as well? Is it toggled to off?
The one and only time I lost a video card, it was due to bad capacitors. Take a look at the caps on your video card and see if there are tiny brown dots at the center of the cross or Y at the top of the cans; that’s the clue that they are dead.
I had an old Shuttle PC die with the same issue, only this was on the motherboard. Sadly, that particular model was well known for having bad caps, so it was just a matter of time until mine died.
If you’re comfortable fiddling with your computer’s innards, try reseating (taking out and putting back in) the graphics card. Sometimes it’s that simple.
I like Jragon’s idea of reseating the card. I’m assuming that it has a video card and not integrated graphics on the motherboard. You may want to reseat the memory chips also.
While inside the computer, make sure to blow out all the dust and grim. Make sure all the fans are spinning. It could just be a heat issue especially if the problem goes away if the computer is shut off for a couple of hours.
Also it’s probably a very, very good time to do a backup of all your important documents to an external hard drive or DVD just in case there’s something going wrong with the entire computer.
I’m really not seeing how that’s possible. Presumably his monitor is plugged into the output on the card, I’m not sure how it’s getting the output from the integrated card if the slotted one is borked. Maybe it’s half-borked and there’s some complex redundancy method graphics cards have to defer and route the display to the onboard card?
It’s also potentially a really gnarly driver issue. First you need to uninstall your drivers and download the new ones (but don’t install them yet). Then you download a program called Driver Sweeper, reboot into Safe Mode and run it. Tell it to analyze Nvidia (or ATI, depending)- Drivers, and then cleaning. Now reboot into not-safe mode and install the new driver.
My next bet would be something in the OS or registry got very strangely messed up in a way that even a restore can’t fix. Before I buy new hardware, I almost always backup all my data and reinstall the OS. This generally eliminates absolutely any ambiguity of whether it’s a software bug or a hardware bug. Obnoxious, to be sure, but it saves you money that you might have spent buying a brand new expensive piece of hardware for no good reason.
Of course, the other standard thing to do (probably even before reinstalling the OS) is to try another card if you can get your hands on one for free (from a friend or another computer) that uses the same set of drivers and see if that works fine.
My bet is software related though, if your passwords and bookmarks disappeared too. (Or the HDD is going and the sector with your display drivers became corrupted).
The reason you’re stuck in low res is because the driver failed to load, and so you’re stuck in VGA mode–a very basic kind of compatibility mode.
The screen going black is a sign that Windows went through its watchdog timeout process, where if the driver hangs or fails to start, it tries to reload it. If something is indeed borked, Windows will eventually give up and you’ll be stuck in VGA mode.
The odds are very high that your video card is the culprit. It could be the memory, but it’s more likely that the chip itself has some defect that appeared over time. Because the VGA core is a tiny fraction of the chip as a whole, it’s very likely that it was unaffected, so that’s why it remains functional. None of the 3D stuff will work in that mode, though.
Another possibility is that your PCI-e bus went bad. If the system can’t reliably send commands to the video card, you would see the same thing. So it could be your motherboard at fault, although I would still put odds on the video card.
It’s a long shot, but Jragon’s suggestion might help. You could also take a pencil eraser to the gold contacts to clean off any crud that gathered on them over time. Gold doesn’t corrode of course, but I’ve seen cases where the contacts needed to be cleaned.
Sounds like a driver issue. The video card failing in a physical way but still being able to display a low resolution screen is a fairly rare failure. Uninstall the driver suite, delete the video card from within device manager (it should automatically redetect it), run driver sweeper, reinstall latest graphics drivers. Or if you have old known good drivers you could try that too.
Did you get any message like “Windows has recovered driver blah blah after failure” when the screens came back up?
I appreciate all the input. I narrowed it down to video card vs. driver.
Try as I might, I was unable to update/install the driver for the card. I uninstalled, then was unable to re-install, even from the original disc; part of the problem may be that I had upgraded to Win 7 from Vista at one point. When attempting to install the driver, my only options were XP and Vista; selecting either of these resulted in a ‘wrong operating system’ error.
So I cracked the case and found that the fan attached to the video card was totally caked in dust. I’m not even sure if the fan was able to rotate. I didn’t think simply clearing out the cobwebs would revive the card so I didn’t even try. In hindsight, maybe that was worth a shot.
Anyway, I bought and installed a new card and all is well. Bonus: even today’s entry level card is much more powerful than my old one; everything on my monitor is sharper and clearer than before.
The takeaway message for us all: blow out your dust regularly.
mmm