Who bleached my desktop?! (Simple computer question)

OK, either I or one of my applications has done a number on my display.

It’s extra bright, the desktop looks “bleached” and washed out, and the icons have a weird gray edging to them.

It’s a laptop, Win XP SP2, NVidia Fx Go 5700. I’m using an external monitor, though, rather than the laptop’s display - a Gateway 21" LCD. This happened suddenly and I’m not sure what caused it. It could well be me - I have a habit of tinkering with settings.

The gamma, brightness, contrast and saturation settings for both the monitor and the video card (both in the NVidia control panel and Windows display properties) are nominal, at their default values which were working fine.

I can probably work around this by futzing with the controls mentioned in the previous paragraph but I’d like to get to the bottom of it.

A reboot doesn’t fix it. Nor does changing resolutions / color depth.

Nor does power-cycling the monitor.

Somewhere, there’s a setting that’s causing this. Bragging rights for whoever finds it :smiley:

Here’s a sample icon.

Have you tried messing with “appearance” in display properties? Under “effects”?

Funny you should say that - I was messing with those settings earlier. In general, I have all the eye candy turned off - the Windows 2000 look-and-feel because I prefer speed to cosmetics. Nevertheless, I’ve been unable to fix this despite trying all the options in the “appearance | effects” menu.

The one thing that is different lately is that I’ve been playing a lot of two particular games - Jedi Academy and Medal of Honor. I wonder if one of those changed some setting in Windows permanently.

On the desktop, try right-clicking and then select Properties → Desktop. On the lower right there’s a little block of colour that, hopefully, is the same colour as the grey in the pic you linked to. Changing it to another colour is easy enough, but I don’t know how to make it transparent. Hope that helps. :slight_smile:

I have a problem similar to that all the time. One of my daughter’s games does it. The solution for me is to just set a Windows theme in the Display control panel to something else and then change it back to what you want.

Shagnasty’s suggestion fixed the annoying gray border around the icons.

The display as a whole is still washed out. One weird thing I noticed is that the LCD display is now listed as “analog display” in the desktop settings, whereas before it was listed correctly as the Gateway LCD + model number. I did install new NVidia drivers - I bet that’s the problem.

Well, Windows suddenly recognizes the monitor using its real model number - but the bleached-out look is still there.

This must be a software problem; I’ve booted Linux and all is well. It’s just under Windows that it’s broken.

Sounds like a driver problem. Reinstall the drivers if you still can’t fix it through the software.

Doing a quick search, there have been problems with the latest drivers, some people suggest dling drivers from here:
http://www.omegadrivers.net/ (I haven’t been there, so I don’t know how good it is)

You could ask here:
http://forums.guru3d.com/forumdisplay.php?&forumid=21 (NVidia driver problem forum)

I also saw this advice (in a question regarding your card on a laptop, but not the same problem)
“nvidia drivers do not have the info for laptop cards by default. go to http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ and download those INF files - they support all laptop nvidia chips.”

Or rollback your drivers in XP.

Thanks, Go You Big Red Fire Engine and others.

I should have mentioned - I did in fact use the modified INF file from www.laptopvideo2go.com.

The strange thing is, it’s working fine now, but I don’t know what fixed it. I changed the resolutions and color depths randomly, changed desktop background, color and picutre, checked and unchecked boxes under “appearances”, and reinstalled my USB printer :dubious: (which for some reason started showing up as an “unknown device”, even though it printed just fine.)

I had already tried rebooting, but just for kicks I booted Linux (it’s a dual boot machine) and the display looked fine, confirming it wasn’t a hardware issue. When I booted back into Windows, the bleaching effect was gone.

If anyone is thinking of getting one of those 21" widescreen Gateway LCD flat panels, BTW - do it! You will not regret it - the display is beautiful (when Windows is behaving).