Thread: Video Card or LCD Monitor problems. Not sure which.

First guess would be that there is some setting on the laptop for screens. Probably manufacturer app rather than the default windows program. I know my old Acer had this where you could select "Presentation" mode, where both would be displayed or both, or 1 or the other. If you did it via Display Properties --> Settings, nothing would happen because that control was given to that 3rd party app.

When you reinstalled did you use a true XP disk, or the manufacturer's restore disk?

Used a true xp sp2 disk. I'm going to try reinstalling one more time. Or maybe I should try the restore disk? I may just go that route. It doesn't have a setting for one or both. It just clones the screen to both monitors (lcd panel and external monitor). I wish the computer had svga, i'd just hook it up there. It worked well with an older monitor I had laying around. I used that monitor to setup the computer. Going to try again.

Well, got it working. I totally wiped the computer and formatted it with fat32. It seems to work great now for some reason. I lost all of my music, though, so I had to recopy everything from my main computer. A bit tedious since my carputer has no wireless. One day. . .

I guess it was just a fluke. Maybe b/c I installed windows xp from my other laptop then moved the disk over to the carputer (carputer is a bit tedious to remove)? Who knows. I was getting so fed up that I was contemplating trying a linux installation out. Glad I didn't have to go that route, not that linux is bad, just unfamiliar. Haven't messed with it since the late 90s or early 2000s. Seems to boot faster with fat32 as well. I went ahead and made 2 partitions as well. . .one for music and one for programs so that i don't have to wipe the music if I ever have to reinstall again. Now I don't have to keep listening to the same albums over and over. I have a big enough HD to put all of my albums on.

EDIT: The thing did it again, and this time I noticed a pattern. It only does it when I tell the bios to boot FIRST from the hard disk. If I ask it to first try to boot from lan or cdrom or floppy, it works fine. I think the monitor is getting too many sync signals too fast from the video card so the monitor just gives up (its a bit slow to sync). I don't quite understand why. I guess its just b/c its a cheap lcd or something. Well, anyways, I'll just have to learn to live with slower post times, but that's fine. At least its working now, consistently. Moral of the story: stick with the better LCD's and stay away from the Hong Kong distributors on ebay. I bought the Power supply and LCD around the same time from there and both ended up being junk. The monitor is pretty good except for the sync times and the native resolution (not that you really need a super high resolution for a small monitor). Brightness is good.

It seems to be working now. I tried it with many settings (800x600, 640x480, 1024x768, even 640x400. . .all of which are supported) with 60hz refresh rate. The surprising thing is that even the boot screen wouldn't appear. After the initial POST screen (with the hp logo) went off, the monitor would say no signal. It works now that I set the hard drive second in the boot order. I set LAN as first. This gives the monitor a second or 2 to finish syncing before the hard disk pulls up the xp boot screen at a different resolution and refresh rate. I'm not really sure why it needs this extra time, but it works this way at least. I'm now back to my original setup. . .60hz refresh and 640x400 resolution in windows xp. You may ask, why 640x400. Its b/c my monitor doesn't support high resolution 16:9 aspect ratio and I wanted any dvds to play with no vertical distortion. 640x400 is the closest I could get to a native 16:9 resolution (ie, 800x480).