My monitor is being stupid?

Tech Talk
#1

Well fuck.

I turn on my computer after returning from a tournament this past weekend and right at the start up (where it says Windows XP and there’s a little loading bar underneath it) there’s this whole mess of ugly boxes and graphical crap. Like you know what your television looked like when you played an old NES game and it wasn’t working, everything is just blocks and shit?

That’s what my screen looks like now. It loads up to XP, then immediately goes into power save mode, then turns on again, then goes to power save, back and forth a couple of times until it either eventually loads up XP or just stays in power save all together.

I’ve checked to make sure the video card is in securely, and the computer is no more then a year old, with the monitor being under 3 months old, so what’s going on? Is my video card dead? Do I need to buy a new one?

>_<

(Yes, I posted this in the comp help thread too, but I’m honestly just looking to see how I can solve this problem asap, so pardon the intrusion.)

#2

This probably won’t make a difference, but just to make sure I would recommend trying to install the latest driver for your video card. I know I had some issues with my monitor wanting to go straight to power save mode when booting when I used Linux until they came out with a better ATI driver. I’m sure one of the real gurus around here will be able to give you some better tips, but it’s worth a shot.

#3

bcuz ur screen hates u

#4

It would be of the biggest help in the world if you could direct me to these drivers (or link me right to them) so I can attempt to get at it when I get home from work. I’m not a computer savvy person so it would mean ALOT if you could point me in the right direction.

#5

The drivers depend on your video card. Do you know what model it is? I have to leave for class basically immediately after this post and then after my classes are over this afternoon I have to go to work. I can check SRK from work, though, so if you post up your video card model, I can look for the drivers for you.

If you don’t know your video card model, I think you can look it up if you go to Start > Control Panel > Device Manager. I think that will give you a list of your system’s hardware… although I could be wrong. I’m not running Windows to be able to look right now. If someone else can verify this for me, I’d appreciate it.

#6

control panel -> system -> hardware tab -> device manager -> display adapters

that should tell you the model and make

#7

I was close, I just missed the “Hardware Tab” step, haha. Thanks for the heads up on the correction. :tup:

#8

Until I get home, is there a general overall page for drivers you can point me towards?

#9

Perhaps. The two most popular manufacturers are ATI and Nvida. Of course, if your card isn’t made by either of them, then those pages don’t do you any good. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any general site that has drivers from all sorts of companies on it.

#10

Ok my card is an ATI Radeon XI6000Pro with 256MB DDR2 or whatever.

PCI express and lots of other stuff.

:looney:

#11

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/radeonx-xp

That should be your latest driver, then. If you download the first one with Catalyst, you’ll just get a random control center application that I never understood when I ran Windows. It lets you do shit like change your resolution and such… which you can just as easily do from Windows itself. Downloading the one that is just listed as “Display Driver” will just download the driver. The installer should be automatic, so just follow the on-screen instructions from there.

#12

Well I downloaded that driver, only to have it first tell me DirectX 8 isn’t installed.

So then I download the latest DirectX, and then go back to the driver, and it suddenly tells me there’s no compatibile fucking drivers to work with.

Fucking hell!

#13

I honestly have no clue. This has moved beyond my understanding. Sorry. :sweat:

#14

Thanks for your help anyway fjf, I appreciate it!