display problem - not VGA nor screen and what else can be?

  • Thread starter Thread starter xfile
  • Start date Start date
X

xfile

Hi,

Appreciate if someone could help this:

I recently have a strange display problem on a desktop system (Windows 2003
Standard, but I doubt it has anything to do with the OS) and I simply don't
know how to find out the cause of the problem.

The symptom is the monitor (15" LCD screen) will have the following: (1)
distorted images during startup progress or (2) the startup image will
freeze at a particular progress (e.g. checking network connection) while the
actual progress already completed (I found out this by using remote desktop
to connect to the system and the mouse is working fine as well).

What I have tested are:

(1) Connect the monitor to a notebook as an external monitor and found no
problems for display. I assume this shows monitor is ok.

(2) Use Remote Desktop to connect to the system when the monitor's image was
either distorted or frozen at one progress bar, but found everything can be
displayed normally within the remote desktop session. I assume this shows
that VGA card is ok.

The only thing that is consistent is this problem will happen only before
login screen is being displayed. Once the login screen has been displayed,
there will be no problems. And this problem is random which means it comes
out once a while and there is no way that I could duplicate it.

Also, there are not error messages in the event logs nor have any conflicts
in device manager.


So could anyone give me some tips about what might be the cause of the
problem?

Or is there a free software or utility that I could run a test on monitor or
VGA card?

Thanks in advance.
 
Remote Desktop doesn't "use" the remotes video card. Sounds like the
video card has an intermittent problem.
 
Hi Bob,

Thanks for sharing that, and I did not know RD does not use remote video
card, and glad to know that.

In any case, I suspect the problem is due to the VGA driver which is strange
enough. We downloaded and installed the latest driver directly from NVIDIA,
and although I can't be for sure, but it seems we installed the driver
previously.

In any case, we un-installed the driver and used the default VGA driver and
so far (two days has passed), no problem at all.

Hope this is the cause of the problem.

Interesting thing for Windows 2003 server, I understand mouse driver (such
as Logitech's) cannot be installed on the machine and don't know even VGA
driver has to use build-in.

In any case, thanks.
 
Good to hear your display issue is resolved, I don't have server 2003 so
I can't comment on the Logictech driver issue other than to suggest
you contact them.
 
Hi,

For the Logitech driver, it is confirmed as it is listed in their web site.
We did not "believe" it before and "thought" Windows 2003 "should" be the
same as Windows 2000 for hardware compatibility and many technical supports
would say the same.

It turns out, based on our own experiences, it is quite different in many
cases.

There are also other "hardware (e.g. BIOS settings)" and/or "driver" related
issues during our recent tests for trying to establish VPN, remote desktop,
and Wake-On-LAN.

What I could say is that Windows 2003 is pretty picky in terms of using
drivers and devices.

For instance, one change in LAN card's power management will ultimately
affect system and display performance.

So in the end, we turned everything back to Windows' native and default
settings.

Many thanks.
 
Back
Top