123Jim said:
Sorry I missed out the crucial info that I don't have access here to a
large screen monitor .. I only took away the system box from the owner
in order to carry out some repairs, but now I want safe mode I seem to
be scuppered ..
I can think of solutions - they just aren't good solutions.
1) Remote into box. In my experiments, this didn't work in Safe Mode.
Maybe you can figure out a way to do that. My laptop told me to take
a flying leap, when I tried to prepare an "invitation" while booted
in Safe Mode. It said whatever service it needed, wasn't running.
2) Delete registry keys that set resolution. Since you've tested a different
graphics interface and seen similar fail results, I don't hold much hope for this.
(There is an example here, involving "BitsPerPel" and friends, but when I
checked my laptop, there were a whole pile of those.) Perhaps you could do
some off-line editing of the existing registry file in question, and
make those changes ? Apparently, you can take a registry file to another
machine and work on it. I've never succeeded in doing that.
http://social.technet.microsoft.com.../thread/4e074fdc-4a49-450a-ae4f-2d17f186a8d2/
Registry keys could also be mass-removed, by installing an empty set
of registry files. These would be the files created when the system was
first installed, and would not have any user preferences in them. But
a side effect of using such a file, is it disables System Restore.
In this example, they copy a set of registry files, out of a Restore Point
folder manually. That would be the equivalent of using a Restore Point,
only not restoring the entire machine state. Just using a registry set
from a few days previous. This is for WinXP, and I don't know if they prepared
similar instructions for Windows 7 or not. You would be doing "Part Two"
and "Part Three", copy and rename some registry files, then move them to the
working folder. In the process of doing this, you may discover the machine
has no Restore Points in the first place. I discovered to my shock, the first
time I looked, that the disk space assigned for Windows 7 System Restore was
too small, and the single Restore Point directory was essentially empty and
useless.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545
And really, at this point, can we be sure the out-of-range is the result
of previously recorded info, or a problem with reading EDID on the current
monitor and doing something stupid with the information ? You could go to a
lot of trouble to change the registry, only to find no difference in symptoms.
You can override EDID, by using a little "EDID memory box" which can be set
up to make a copy of EDID from some other, working monitor. That is useful
for cases, where the display device has no EDID (like a wall projector).
It won't help if the OS is quite insistent it won't pay attention to
the EDID - I have a monitor here that doesn't "Plug and Play" worth a
damn, and there's got to be something about the EDID contents it doesn't
like. The EDID looks fine in Moninfo program.
Programs like Powerstrip and Moninfo, make it possible to work on
display problems, but again, I don't see a way given your restricted
environment, of getting any value from these. Powerstrip is available
for an evaluation period, which might be enough in some cases to
get some work done on a system.
http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm
http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/moninfo.shtm
There have been cases, where the EDID chip on the monitor is writable,
and the EDID gets overwritten and needs some TLC to set it right again.
That's a whole other topic.
I'm just surprised there isn't a magic key combo to "force" the
graphics system into using sensible settings that all monitors support.
And 640x480 should do that. On my laptop, alt-F5 allows me to step
through some multi-monitor configurations, but I don't know if any of
those would suit the "force to 640" thing or not. And my desktop
doesn't seem to support that. F5 does nothing on the desktop machine.
Paul
