I’m doing the equivalent of laying down on the floor and whimpering like a scared kitten.
I had to do a complete system restore. About everything is lost. Well, I got it set so that it works, but the display is killing me. It’s the size that Mr Magoo would need. I have the monitor hooked up to an Nvidia G3 card. I went to their website and downloaded what I think is the driver, but on restart I just got a blank screen. (The power light was green, so there was a signla getting to it.) It’s working right now, but I hate to download the wrong driver again and have to go through another recovery to start over.
And hints on what I’m doing wrong? I went through this a few years ago but can’t remember what the trick is.
Look at every single tab under the Display control panel especially Appearances. Play with those. Report back on effects.
Download a utility called Powerstrip from www.download.com. That is a great utility that gives you all kinds of control (it is kind of a master driver itself).
All the settings look fine. “Appearance” font is set to normal, Display shows 'default monitor on S3 Graphics ProSavage DDR", 1600x1200 pixels. Everything in the advanced options look OK, though admittedly I may not know what to look for exactly. I can’t see anything out of the ordinary.
It’s everything. Browser, taskbar, desktop, individual windows. It’s something in the hardware settings or config.
I went to Download. The only thing for Powerstrip I could find was an adaware program. I downloaded a driver for an Nvidia Forceware update for XP. I’ll give it a try, but if you don’t hear from me tomorrow, I’m doing yet another recovery.
One other thing, the “refresh” rate must be too low. When I scroll down a page, it isn’t that smooth gliding that’s normal. It’s like snapshots floating by.
I know my frustration is getting the best of me and I’m not seeing the obvious flaw in my approach. I really do appreciate the suggestions.
You are taking this too seriously. I have had that happen several times. A good systems person works through problems for their own understanding rather than doing an instant wipe and restore when things look bleak. Don’t do any more restores or anything like that. It truly isn’t a big problem and can easily be fixed as soon as you understand the problem.
Try Powerstrip below. It is a really good utility that gives you all kinds of monitor control.
PS - for the Refresh rate, you need to go to the Settings - Advanced tab (Monitor) of your Display control panel. There are all kinds of things in there that you can look at and I have always been able to fix things from there.
Again - Basics first. This is a simple problem that happens all the time.
It might behoove you to “start over” with the display drivers. Go to the Device Manager, and remove the entries for the video adaptor and for the monitor, then reboot. When Windows restarts, it will redetect these devices and attempt to reinstall the drivers. If you’re lucky, thie reinstall will put everything back the way it should be. At worst, you won’t be any worse off than you are at the moment. It might be a good idea to download the latest drivers for these devices first, and tell the New Hardware wizard to use those instead of the Windows default drivers. Good luck.
Back to half-normal. Thanks for the link Shagnasty. Still a little large, but tolerable after 2 days of looking at little more than a colored Etch-A-Sketch.
I’ll play with it a bit and see what I can do. Changing from 32-bit to 256 color looks a bit better, but there has to be another setting I’m missing here.
I thought of trying to remove the GeForce stuff and letting Windows detect and install it, but wasn’t sure what to do. I’m play around with the Device Manager when I get daring, but for tonight this is good enough.
I need rest to fix the computers everyone else screws up. :eek:
I maxed the refresh rate at 85 Hz, but it’s still that “jumpy” scroll look. Oh well. Back to it tomorrow. Thanks guys, for helping me get something that at least isn’t visually pissing me off anymore.
Still a little large, but tolerable after 2 days of looking at little more than a colored Etch-A-Sketch.