Re: Video Card Install Problems

boris-badenough@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mar 17, 11:41 am, boris-badeno...@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mar 17, 10:28 am, "Tom Scales" <tjsca...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm interested in the comment on the nVidia. Both machines are capable
of wide screens. All nVidia cards of that age or newer can do it
happily. What was the symptom of the problem?
I'm going to go back and install the old cards, download their current
drivers, and try again. Like you say, it should work. With respect
to your question, the problem is turning out to be my unfamiliarity
with the basics of video output and how to interpret some Windows
information screens.

In my post, I said that I had the display settings 'enabled to show
all settings, even if the monitor can't display them', but, there are
no widescreen settings listed. William correctly reminds me that
this information is for refresh rate. Thank you, William. I meant to
say that in Display Properties>Settings>Advanced>Adapter>List All
Modes, there were no wide screen resolutions available to chose with
the old cards. This led me to believe the cards weren't capable of
WS, and it never crossed my mind that a more current driver would add
that capability. I had always looked at that as hardware (card)
dependent. I may have this stuck in my mind from long ago, when
depending on what CRT one ordered, the Dell (or was it Gateway?) order
screen would give you a mis-match, stating that that particular video
card would not drive the monitor you wanted.

Been busy, but I finally got my video issues straightened out and
learned a lot at the same time. I wanted to report back.

I did reinstall the Dell supplied nVidia GeForce 7300 LE video card in
the E520, and I updated the drivers from the NVidia site. I still had
a 4:3 monitor (LG 19") attached, and no 16:10 resolutions appeared in
the display settings. I connected a 16:10 monitor (LG 22"), and lo
and behold, 16:10 resolutions appeared in the display settings. I
reattached the 4:3 monitor, and the 16:10 resolutions no longer
appeared in the display settings. I had always thought that a video
card reports to the display settings window, all the resolutions it
can output, regardless of the monitor connected to the card's port. I
guess that's because I've always done 4:3 and max 1600 x 1200, which
all my cards have been able to handle.

The nVidia GeForce card drove both the 4:3 LG 19" monitor and the
16:10 LG 22" monitor. So, I discovered that I didn't have to buy this
card to get 16:10 resolution, but...

I installed the ATI Radeon HD3650 card, and updated it's drivers from
the ATI site. I connected tried both monitors, and both worked fine.

Remember that "muddled screen from POST through the "Microsoft
Corporation" with the moving green loading bar" that I reported in my
original post? It still exists, but under one condition only. The
Radeon card has two DVIs out, A and B. When I connect the 4:3 LG 19"
to port A, which is how I was doing all of my testing last week, I
still get the 'muddled screen until Vista loads completely. But, if I
connect this same monitor to port B, it works just fine, beginning at
POST. I connected a 1440 x 900 HP 19" to both ports, and it was fine
on both.

When I connect the 16:10 LG 22" to port A or port B, it also works
fine from beginning to end.

For some reason, the 4:3 LG 19" and the Radeon's port A don't get
along in VGA mode.

Life is for learning.

One of the true innovations with Windows is that the video drivers ask the monitor to report its supported resolutions, and these are the ones shown by the video driver software in Control Panel. Consider that if a monitor is driven at an unsupported resolution, it may simply fail from the stress of unsupported scan frequencies. Not sure when this innovation came about, either with Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

In the bad old days of DOS-based Windows 95/98/ME, the drivers did report all the combinations of resolution and color depth supported by the graphics card or subsystem. But that was before the industry got some more good sense and developed standards for monitors to communicate with computers. Building said intelligence into monitors eliminates the need for driver files for each monitor to specify resolution, color depth, horizontal frequency, vertical frequency, and a host of other characteristics... Ben Myers
.

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