Some things just disappear on my computer, a relatively new LeNovo IdeaPad. This morning there was a survey I wanted to take and it started with “Click on the next button”, but there was no next button. I finally went to a different computer and there was a next button. It was a kind of pale cyan but readily visible. When I open the color chart in the settings all the squares show up, but there is one anomaly: the first four entries of the bottom two rows are identical, pair by pair, which likely makes no sense.
Does any Doper have any idea what is wrong? Or how to fix it? Thanks in advance.
I don’t know your set up, but years ago I had a similar color problem and the culpret was one of the pins in the connector to my monitor was bent.
I wasn’t making contact.
I don’t know if your computer has a cord with pins as an integral part of the connector.
I’m old and don’t know the ways of new fangled things.
Try a different browser. When parents do the on line registration process at our district, they have to use Chrome for it to work right. Safari, in fact, has missing buttons and things just like your issue.
Just testing the chrome browser. Nope. Didn’t help. One of the things that doesn’t show up is the staff color. I added staff color to this post and you should see it, but I don’t.
See if you can partially close the laptop in such a way you can still see the display as it moves and look for different appearance. Sometimes just flexing the ribbon cables makes a display problem better or worse but at least helps identify the shaky connection.
Go to the Windows desktop and right-click on an empty area and choose “Graphics Properties”. (Note: this may not be exactly what it’s called on your laptop. Depending on the embedded graphics controller it uses, it may be named a little differently.) Usually within these settings there is a tab or option which allows you to adjust the color settings. You might be able to do slight tweaks to the brightness and contrast settings which might make the buttons more visible on the web page. Making minor adjustments to the gamma level may help, too.
Tried it. Let’s see what happens when I added staff color. Asnwer: nothing happened.
I right-clicked on the desktop and something called “display settings” showed up, which I clicked on. This took me to a window that invited me to turn on HDR color, which I did. It showed two pictures, one a city-scape and the other a snowy mountain. When I enlarged them to full screen, as instructed, a slider appeared and I was invited to slide to maximize the details on the buildings and the mountain. I moved the slider to the far right and rather more colors appeared on the mountain, while the buildings didn’t appear to change at all. So I accepted that setting. But when I tried adding staff color to this post, no color appeared. I took it off just now.
In the search box, type color filters and see if any color filters are turned on. When I enabled the Red-green (red weak, protonopia) setting, it looked like cyan disappeared on my monitor.
In the search box, type color management and then go to the Advanced tab. See if everything is set to System default.
In the same Color Management dialog box, click the All profiles tab. Under WCS Device Profiles, both file names on my computer are wsRGB.cdmp, and under WCS Viewing Conditions Profiles they are D65.camp and D50.camp. If the names on your computer are different, it might indicate a problem in the color management area.
Microsoft’s answer, as always for everything, is to reinstall the driver for your display.
No color filters were turned on and I didn’t try turning any on. There was a color wheel on that page; all colors were visible although not all distinct.
Everything was set to system default.
The first was set to sRGB **** where the asterisks were some random looking string (you cannot copy these entries to the clipboard). The second just said WCS 2RGB. I briefly considered changing these (there were lots of options), but I afraid of screwing things up even worse.
The computer is less than 6 months old and no one would have touched these settings. But thanks for trying.
Since the computer is less then a year old, it’s probably still in warranty.
Have you tried contacting Lenovo?
If you want to try updating the drivers first you can download them from the support website (support.lenovo.com) or by using the system update software (this will scan your computer and update any out of date drivers).
If Lenovo asks you to send it into their depot, make sure to backup any data first.
There are two reasons for not doing that. I have already sent it back (at my expense) for repairs once. Although they did fix the problem (the bluetooth driver had stopped working) they could have told me over the phone how to replace that driver. Although web sites gave instructions, none of them gave instructions that I could follow. It happened again while my son was visiting and, somehow, he was able to find out the utterly obscure procedure that fixed it.*
The second reason is more subtle. I don’t have, on my computer, any actual example of the problem. It comes from web sites. Such as the non-appearance of staff colors on the boards and this questionnaire where the next button had disappeared but I found it by cranking up my tablet that I use only for travel. Without an actual example, it seems futile.
*TL;DR Just in case this helps someone, here are the instructions my son found:
Load Device manager
Click on “USB devices”
Look for “Unrecognized USB device”
Right click on it and hit uninstall
Reboot
And, in case you were wondering, when the Bluetooth turned off it was not listed in the device manager which was why I couldn’t reinstall it. (Although you got it if you looked for hidden devices, but I hadn’t realized that.)
OK, so checking computer settings is getting nowhere. (As far as the colors in the bottom rows in Color Settings looking the same, they look the same on my computer too, but if you hover the mouse over them, they have different names). So let’s find out if the IdeaPad can display that cyan color at all and potentially give you an “actual example of the problem.”
This is what I would try: Go to the other computer and the website with the cyan button and note the color. If you can get the exact RGB value, so much the better, but a visual estimate is fine. Then, on the IdeaPad, open Paint or PowerPoint or any program where you can draw an object and fill it with color. Fill the object with the cyan color and see what happens. Save the file with the object on the IdeaPad so you can show it to a repair person.
Okay, this might be a clue. What web browser are you using when this occurs, and do you see the same issue if you use another web browser? I know that under gerneral setting for Firefox there is a section specifically for which fonts and colors are used by default when viewing web pages.
I took out the other computer and opened the boards and discovered something surprising. I opened GD on the boards (for no particular reason) and discovered that the of the two numbers on a thread showing the number of posts I had not read, the second number was in a disk of a color I would call cyan. On the this computer it is just a disembodied number. So that is the color. I don’t know how to describe it. It is similar to the color surrounding the SD logo, but considerably less saturated. It is similar to the color that surrounds the letter that is the mark of some of the Dopers who have not chosen an avatar, but is somewhat more saturated. The whole thing strikes me as bizarre. I will try your suggestion using paint. Maybe that will work, but I don’t hold out much hope.
Thanks for taking the time and I will let you know if I get anywhere.
The RGB for cyan is 0,255,255; hex 00FFFF – blue and green but no red. You haven’t said what browser you were using in your OP, but for Chrome, there are a couple of things you can try. First, turn off hardware acceleration (actually, you should be able to do this for all browsers). Second, try the fix in this article.