Monitor and Video Adapter
The Midnight Question Archive
see the new: Video Card Troubleshooting
and Start Your Own PC Business
Copyright 2005 by Morris Rosenthal
Monitor and Video AdapterThe Midnight Question Archive see the new: Video Card Troubleshooting and Start Your Own PC Business Copyright 2005 by Morris Rosenthal |
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Troubleshooting your Laptop or PC
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See the new Troubleshooting your laptop or PC (May 2008)3/9/99(Q) I am building my own pc. I followed the instrucions and everything seemed to be going fine the initial boot up was fine it went thru the BIOS then I powered down to add more cards--then rebooted and the monitor has no video the litle yellow light comes on but it dosen't follow up with the green light and a picture. I switched monitors nothing, I switched cords nothing, took out all the cards except the graphics card nothing, tried a different PCI slot nothing. What went wrong? I really hope I don't have replace the motherboard, it's brand new. I even tried a different graphics card nothing happened, so I tried the graphic card I was using in a another computer to see if it was the problem it worked fine. Nichole (A) It does sound like the motherboard. With some ATX motherboard and power supplies, you should really unplug them from the wall before adding adapters, because there is always 700mA or so available on the I/O bus for adapters to do Wake On LAN or Wake on Ring (with modems). That applies even when the computer is switched off. It's a somewhat unpublicized fact, but I've seen some detailed photographs actually showing motherboard failure from this cause, intermittent shorts burning motherboard traces and discrete components up during insertion. Morris 3/1/99(Q) I was wondering if you could give me an approximation of how much it costs in electricity to operate a computer. This is a strange question, but my roommate and I are arguing, and I say it costs virtually nothing in kilowatt hours which is part of the convenience of computers, while he says that if my computer is on approx. four hours a day that it costs 20% of our electric bill which is a full bill of $800. I think this is impossible--just so you know, it's a personal computer-300MMX I think, just a plain average computer I bought in 1998. Could you please give me some kind of guess as to the cost of operation, even if you can say it's a few dollars or cents. I'm Canadian too by the way, but I can do the conversion. Michelle (A) Holy %$^&, what do you guys pay per KWH, or is that like a bill for a year? I thought with all the hydro, Canadian electricity was practically free. At any rate, a 14" monitor probably averages around 150W (120Vx1.2A or 220V x .6A) and the system box uses a fairly efficient switching power supply which probably draws less than it's full power rating, normally 200W. So, all in all, a working PC is equivalent to three or four 100 Watt bulbs. Refrigerators are big draws, microwaves draw over a kilowatt when they're running, and of course, nothing comes close to electric heat for a waste of energy. Easiest way to check is to turn the thing on and watch your meter for an hour, turn it off and watch for an hour. If we call it 350Watts for four hours at $.10 per KWH, thats about $.15 (15 cents) a day. Morris 2/22/99(Q) I decided to upgrade my machine (or better, buy a second one) and yesterday I did so: a PentiumII 400Mhz with 64M, All in wonder and DVDBut on Saturday I brought home my brand new monitor, a nice 19"Samsung monitor... I'm hearing some strange sounds in the back of it. I mean, it's a cracking sound like the one the static produces in a TV screen after turned off (and as you pass your hand in front of it, you know the sound? Sounds like little firecracks in the back of it were being blasted, or like those bubble gum that explodes in your mouth...) Today, Monday, I started to work as normal and the sounds started again after half an hour of being turned on the screen... I'm very worried... is it normal? Can I do something? Should I tell the store and change the monitor? Pablo (A) Definitely tell the store, and see what they advise. I've actually seen some brand new monitors that smell like burning electronics for the first few days, then are fine after that. It's strange, since monitors, unlike PCs, are always "burned in" to an extent, because they can't make the final adjustments without powering them on. All the same, noise is never a good thing. Morris 11/17/98(Q) I was given a Dell 486/dx4 this past year and have had fits trying to get the on board 1 MG video card to funtion with a Hyundai monitor. It functions fine in DOS, but in Windows I get either 3-4 vertically split screens ( none very readable ), or just a bunch of snow on the screen. When I install an old ISA video board I get mediocre video. I would really like to use the on board video and have the ISA slot for a sound card or something else. I have tried to contact the manufacturer of the chip set used on the board, Cirrus (chip set CL-GD5429 ), have downloaded the most current drivers and found that it has to have Windows up and running to install the drivers. Its a sort of fatal loop- I can't run windows without the on board video, and can't install new drivers without windows. Are there still ISA video cards available that I can find somewhere? Jim (A) You need to go to the Windows directory, type Setup, and change the video driver to plain VGA. Then you should be able to start Windows and install the correct driver. If you want to buy a new ISA video card, you should be able to find a 1MB Trident or Cirrus for around $30 in mail order or at a fair. I haven't noticed if the stores still sell them. Morris 11/12/98(Q) I have a Sound Blaster PCI128 sound card (the Ensonics kind without a processor) and a brand new Viper V330 PCI 8 MB video card. They're running on an Intel Pentium 233 MMX with 32 MB of SDRAM and Win 95 B. In certain games (directX games?? - e.g. Rainbow 6, Need For Speed IISE, Jedi Knight, MS Urban Assault, etc.) the sound works fine in the beginning (menus, player selection, etc.), but once the "action" portion begins -- no sound. I have DirectX 6 (have reinstalled more than once). If I go into System Properties | Performance | Graphics and move the slider (Hardware Acceleration) down two notches to "Basic," then sound works in the troubled games. (The video is horrible, of course, but the sound works fine). I removed the PCI128 sound card and replaced it with an ISA Sound Blaster 16 and the games worked again. Occasionally, however, my system will freeze up and a couple hundred short (1/4") green vertical lines will appear at the top of the screen, forming a bar extending across the monitor. Creative Labs says they don't know, but maybe the video card is taking up too much CPU. Diamond says its not their card, but the sound card. Christopher (A) I'd be inclined to blame Diamond, especially with the occasional video freezes. If you aren't having DMA conflicts, then the video card is probably monopolizing the PCI BUS. If you're married to the Diamond, a higher quality ISA sound card might be on order - the bandwidth demands aren't that great. Morris (Follow-up) I replaced the Viper temporarily with my old Stealth DRAM card and the same problem persists. That makes me think it must be combo Sound Blaster PCI128 and any PCI video card. Diamond continues to (rightfully?) blame Creative Labs. What's odd is that some 3D games (like Moto Racer) work fine, sound and all. Christopher (A) Well, I sure was wrong. Since you already installed the updated drivers for the Sound Blaster, a different sound card does look like the best way out. I guess I haven't been keeping up with the demands of some of these new sound cards, thanks for the heads-up. Morris 10/19/98(Q) I bought a new laptop recently (Toshiba Satelite325 CDS) and the monitor on it is a DSTN. This is normally OK, but some applications I use are too dark to be seen properly. I was hoping to connect the laptop to my TV, but I don't know how to go about doing this. Is there a connector (preferably cheap) on the market, or would it be possible to make one? Or, is there another alternative, other than buying a new monitor? David (A) There are VGA to TV converters, but a 14" SVGA monitor down here in the lower 48 goes for about $100 on sale, and you won't find an adapter much cheaper than that. Besides, TV's lack the resolution of monitors, small text can't be read even if you sit right in front of them, and that's not good for your eyes. Monitors are designed for a viewing distance of about 18", TV's for many feet. Morris 10/9/98(Q) I want to replace my 4MB Matrox Millenium video card with an 8MB ATI All-in-Wonder Pro. My OS is Win 98. Once upon a time I would have changed my video resolution to plain vanilla VGA (640 x 480) and then shut down the machine, installed the new video card, rebooted, let the OS discover the new card and followed the prompts or run the card's installation software. Now I am a bit nervous over what should be a simple upgrade. I just changed motherboard and CPU, leaving all other hardware alone. Although there are still conflicts shown, if you look for them, everything runs OK. Resolving all the conflicts seems to be an impossible mission. There doesn't seem to be enough information available to allow me to resolve them all. Leonard (A) I've been pretty lucky with 98, more so than 95. When replacing any card under 95 or 98, I go into Device Manager and delete the device, than shut down (propperly) and swap cards. The new card should then be autodetected, and you'll be given an opportunity to supply an updated manufacturer's driver. The unresolved conflicts don't sound good, they may bite you on the tail eventually. They are often I/O ranges used for onboard controllers, like the secondary IDE and PCI bridge, that if you aren't using them, you won't suffer, but they can be esily resolved by moving the ranges around in Device Manager until the conflict dissapears. Morris 9/29/98(A) I'm upgrading my motherboard from a socket 3 AT to a super 7 ATX with an AGP. I downgraded the operating system on the hard drive to Windows 3.1 right before I yanked it from the old system. My plan is to upgrade to Windows 95 on the new system so it will do a clean detect of all the devices. Just as I was about to finish swapping hardware, I discovered the new board didn't have the ISA expansion slot needed for my old video card, so I'm considering purchasing an AGP board. My question is will the AGP board come up in standard VGA mode so I can upgrade in the absence of the AGP and OEM drivers? Stan Yes, but many of the new video cards, AGP and PCI, don't support old monitors, pre 1994'ish. Even some SVGA monitors with low scan rates don't support any of the newer modes. Just stuck an AGP Socket 7 system under a DOS/Windows box myself, standard Windows 3.1 VGA driver, screams. Morris 9/25/98(Q) I was online writing a few emails and suddenly my display started to fade to grey..Within seconds it went so grey I could not see anything. My monitor is about 7 years old ( pre Win 95 ) so I assumed my monitor died. I went to CompUSA bought a new one....Plugged it in, booted up to GREY.....This time I could at least see faint text & my Desktop....I realized of course it couldn't be a monitor problem....So I reinstalled my video drivers hoping they got corrupt...Alas...Nothing changed and I'm at a loss. Jan (A) Certainly sounds like your video card, which you haven't replaced yet. I also would have suspected monitor first, but video adapter pretty much has to be it. Remember, VGA is an all analog interface, the intensity of the signals produced by the card translates to the brightness and colors on the screen. If the D/A (digital to analog) converter fails, the card must be replaced. (And so it was). Morris 8/4/98(Q) I have seen reference to 2X AGP 3D Acceleration cards, I am still unsure as to the number of cards the port will support. Does the 2X refer simply to a single, dual-chipset board (eg. 2 Voodoo2 chipsets running in tandem), or to 2 video cards running in tandem? I ask because the computer I am building needs to have speedy 2D functions as well as 3D acceleration. With current cards, I feel the optimum solution for my needs would appear to be a nice, fast 2D card running alongside a dedicated 3D Accelerator - Is it possible for me to utilize the AGPort for 2 dedicated cards in this fashion, or will I still need a PCI based card if I want the best of both worlds? (To date, I have not been real impressed by the combo 2D/3D acceleration cards, but I'm keeping my eyes on the newer AGP 2D/3D combo cards to see how their specs compare to the separate-card-for-each-function configuration...) Carl (A) AGP is a single port that supports a single card. The 2X and 4X refer to basic level of acceleration (133MHz or 266MHz), though I'm damned if I can remember where these numbers come from. The AGP bus is twice as fast, 66MHz (some motherboards may have 100MHz AGP) v.s. 33MHz for PCI, and the pipelining supports two transfers per clock cycle, either of those could be the 2X. I do know that the 4X doesn't exist yet. The peak theoretical throughput of the current version is 533MB/s, v.s. 132MB/s for PCI. Morris 7/2/98(Q) Recently my father purchased an MSD Advanced/ML ATX Mainboard 82430HX chipset from Seoul,S.Korea.
Recently ,I wanted to upgrade my video card to a PCI card with 2MB RAM. I tried out three or four cards available here including Cirrus Logic but none of them seemed to work. After connecting the card I found that on switching the machine on there was one long beep followed by two short ones instead of the normal 'pip'. Also my monitor remained in standby mode. On adjusting the jumpers placed on the mainboard I was able to get my normal 'pip'but the monitor remains in standby. Please advice me about the video card I must purchase for the above mainboard as my technician says that it is a chipset incompatibility problem. Also please let me know if such a card is available in India and where I could obtain it. Len I'm surprised that the Realtek card works, it's about as obsolete as they come. I don't believe the chipset can have a poblem with several vanilla PCI cards, more likely the motherboard is faulty, perhaps a problem with the PCI bus. Outside of checking CMOS Setup and restoring the default settings from the BIOS, I can't think of anything else. Well, you might try an ISA 1MB or 2MB card, you'll lose in performance over what you would have gotten with the PCI, but at least you'll be able to run true color. Morris 6/12/98(Q) I have a really dumb problem. When I play Minesweeper on my Win95 Gateway P5/200, I can't get at the options. I mean, the game starts (always on expert), but the grid aligns with the top of the screen, so I can't reach the title bar to drag it down, or see the tool bar. I've changed resolution several times, to 800X600, for example, and immediately after I can see the whole thing, but the next time I call it up, it's off the top of the screen again. I have to shut down Win95 every time I want to close it. Help! Karl (A) Well, actually, even when you can't reach the tool bar, you can still get at the menu commands if you click the mouse in the active screen and use "Alt-F", for the File menu. Also, you can shut it down by right-clicking on the Minesweeper section in the taskbar at the bottom of the screen and chosing close. Now, the reason it comes up where it does is due to the coordinates in the ".ini" file, which you can find in the same directory as the ".exe", I think it's normally in the main C:\Windows directory. When you click on "winmine.ini", (the winmine file with the notepad icon), it will open the file in notepad. You can then increase the Y-Coordinate on opening to any value you like, something around 30 should clear the top of the screen. Morris 5/15/98(Q) I have a 386DX-40 with an Oak Technologies 512k 607B chipset video card (circa 1990) using the default Windows 3.1 VGA driver. I have one program that tells me it's written for Hi-color mode and will not display properly at 256 colors while another one tells me it's written for 256 colors and will not display properly at my setting of 16 colors. I tried changing to a 256 color driver and lost the video altogether. The only way I could get it back was to reinstall Windows! I picked up Oak drivers off the Internet and installed them but when I selected one (for 286 and above computers) I lost the video again. Does anybody still sell new ISA or VLB cards since everything is PCI now? Allan (A) The 512K should certainly handle 256 colors, it won't do High Color or beyond. The default Windows 3.1 driver is 16 color, if you screw up, you can restore the VGA default by typing "Setup" in the Windows directory (C:\Windows) and selecting it, no need to reinstall Windows. The only 256 color driver likely to work would be the one for plain VGA resolution (640x480), I doubt the card has the D/A converter necessary to display more colors even if memory sufficed. You can certainly still buy ISA cards, I suggest a Trident 8900, 1MB, which for around $30 will get you 16million colors, albeit a little slowly. Check Computer Shopper for mail order, or ask at your local PC shop (not superstore) if they have one around. Morris 5/4/98(Q) There is this program, used for gaming, called Game Wizard. Now what this program did was, "look" in the memory for any string you entered. It would find all the strings, and then save them. Then you could repeat this several times to narrow down the search until it found the one you were looking for. For example, if I wanted to find where the number of bullets I had, I would first enter the number I had currently, like 100, then go to the program, and look for "100", return to my game, pop off a 3 rounds, go back and look for "97", and repeat this process until I found the string I was looking for. After this, I could 'lock' in whatever number I wanted to the variable, so if I locked in 100, then I would have infinate ammo. Now, what I am looking for is a program that can function in a simular way, but I have not been able to find even a memory "looker" or "editor", my question is, do these lookers or editors exist for Windows 95? Jaysen (A) The basic funtionality of the program you describe is included in the old DOS debugger, or in a program like Nortons. One of the issues that comes up any time you are trying to foil a peice of software is whether the the string you are searching for is stored in ASCII (0 = 30HEX, 1 = 31HEX, etc) or whether it is stored as a pure number (0 = 0HEX, 1 = 1HEX, etc). Of course, if you're tring to hack the serial number out of a protected piece of software, they probably taken the orecaution of encoding it. At any rate, isn't what you are describing also know as cheating? Morris 4/27/98(Q) I occasionally like to play older video games on my Pentium clone system. One game I really like to play is Populous II, but the games delay routines do not seem to be able to handle the speed of a Pentium computer. I am running a AMD K5-PR166 overclocked to 262.5 with 32 megabytes of RAM. I play the game on my dad's 486 and it runs, but on my system it is just really dang fast. The computer opponent is working many times faster than me, and it is impossible. I was wondering if you knew of any system decellorator programs. I saw one a few years ago but paid no heed, and cannot remeber what is called, and searching the web for system deccelorator and other variants has been fruitless. Danny It's funny, I know what you mean, but I haven't seen such a software decellorator since the PC AT came out at 6MHz, scewing up the 4.77MHz PC XT games. What you can do is pop into CMOS before starting and dissable external and/or internal cache, which will knock the hell out of the performance. Just remember to set it back when you're done. Morris (A) The program is called Slowdown. The folks at EPIC told me about it. I think I got it from TUCOWS. Steve 3/16/98(Q) I am interested in PC hardware,how to build a pc,how to install card, scanners, memory, cdrom drives, how to write batch files, how to solve conflicts. What book do you recommend (an easy, well explained book) and how much is it? Also, what is the best magazine? Tariq (A) Well, I've never called a question dumb before, but I thought it was pretty evident that I'm a big fan of The Hand-Me-Down PC, which oddly enough, I wrote. The book can be ordered directly from me or AMAZON (click here) for $17.56, or through your local bookstore. The book has been expanded about 50% over the online book to include Pentiums, Windows 95, and other topics, and includes 70 illustrations. For magazines, I'm a big fan of Computer Shopper, both for the articles and ads. Morris 1/20/98(Q) I have a 60MHz Pentium running DOS 6.2, Windows 3.1, Netscape 3.0, and QuickLink2 Fax software. My son complains that the PC freezes for long periods of time downloading web pages, and that the colors come out lousy. My fax software keeps on trying to send faxes to people I haven't chosen to receive them, and a technician told me my hard drive was "bad". The same technician, in an effort to speed up my system, upgraded it from 16MB RAM to 32MB RAM, but I can't tell the difference, it's still slower than many 486's. To top it all off, MSD (MicroSoft Diagnostics) reports the system as a 486. Can you come downstairs and help? (My downstairs neighbor in Israel, M.R.) Chaim (A) In reverse order (the following is based on going downstairs, I'm not this good a diagnostician via e-mail), you are running the older version of MSD in your Windows directory due to your PATH statement. The MSD version in your DOS 6.2 directory correctly reports the CPU as a Pentium. Next, unless you are running AutoCAD, or some other software with independant memory management, going over 16MB on a Windows 3.1 system doesn't help performance unless you use it all as disk cache. A 60MHz Pentium IS slower than a 100MHz or 120MHz 486, particularly running older DOS/Windows programs. Your hard drive was badly fragmented, the DEFRAG program in DOS 6.2 cured the thrashing and sped things up. At some point in the past, somebody tried sending the same fax to your entire address book in QL2 Fax, than aborted the process. Every time the fax manager starts (like when you try sending a single fax), it first tries to continue with the old job. Deleting all of the pending faxes fixes the problem. Your video card, although it is a 1MB Trident 8900 capable of 16 million colors at VGA resolution, was running on the default Windows VGA driver, which uses only 16 colors. Installing the Trident 256 color (or higher) driver will make the pictures load faster and look right. Morris 1/14/98(Q) This summer I built a Pentium 200 Mhz, Tyan Titan 1572 440 TX with 512k cache computer with 64 Meg EDO Ram computer. I installed the hard drives (I have tried 3 to correct the problem, disk drive, Motorolla 33.6 Voice surfer, Sound blaster AWE 32 OEM, and all other required equipment. When I am using the internet, writing letters in Word, playing games ect. the computer beeps 3-7 times, the screen flashes on and off, and the mouse is non-responsive. Some times, moving the mouse or striking various keys on the keyboard makes the computer beep again and the screen comes back on. Other times it does not. I have tried running a bare-bone system, purchased 2 different cd-rom drives ( 12x IDE, and 24x Soundblaster EIDE) the two controllers on the mother board support both types) 2 different video cards by Diamond each w 4 megs ram on-board, Stealth 2000 3D and the new Stealth II. It is not a keyboard or mouse problem because I have borrowed about 6 and each works fine. The three hard drives I have tried are a Maxtor 853 mb IDE HD, a Western Digital IDE 2.1 Gig HD and a Western Digital Enhanced IDE HD. I have tried reloading all the drivers, formatting the Hard drives, reloading all of Windows 95, and re-installing all of my ISA cards. Nothing seems to work. Also, sometimes, the computer will work just fine like it is right now while I am writing this letter. Other times, when I restart, it begins beeping about 4 min. into the work I am doing. John (A) You've done a good job describing the problem, unfortunately, it sounds like one of those (fairly rare) motherboard or CPU problems. I'd lean towards motherboard, maybe even the keyboard controller. The time aspect indicates a heating issue, where CPU, memory, and keyboard controller are usually the leading culprits. The keyboard interface is one of the few components that SHOULD be capable of causing a random number of beeps, in the form of a false stuck key error. I'd also try dissabling external cache and running (slow as a dog) just because it's an easy thing to check. Give an ISA video card a shot just to see if your motherboard despises Diamond. Morris 1/8/98(Q) I recently bought a game called "Riven" I have had problems with the game. During movie play the pointer would disappear. This is normal for the game but it never came back this is not normal. I know how to fix the problem but I have no idea how to do it. I need to upgrade my video driver to the latest version. I do not know where to find out what video driver I currently have or where to find the upgrade. How do I find the kind of card I have and where do I get the latest driver? Yes I run windows 95. Paul (A) ControlPanel>Display>Settings>AdvancedProperties or ControlPanel>System>DeviceManager>DisplayAdapter will get you to the same place, where your card and the current driver are identified. The card manufacturer will have a web site with the latest drivers for downloading, you can find them using THE HARDWARE WEB LIST, or DRIVERS HQ, both of which are on my PCLINKS page (www.daileyint.com/hmdpc/pclinks.htm). Morris 1/1/98What to do with my fine Hitachi HM-4119 fixed frequency monitor (1024 x 768). It has a 1 meg (maxed out) PCG (PERSONAL COMPUTER GRAPHICS CORP) Photon Ultima Turbo video card that is not up to snuff (slow and flaky) with my new Pentium system. PCG will sell me a new, bigger and better card for $600 plus exchange of my original card. The drivers are Trident, (one is 8900). I've learned that this is a "freak" or "esoteric" video system, "if you don't have a driver for your program, all your going to see is 1/3 of a screen (wrong aspect ratio) or big horizontal streaks if any graphics are involved". This is a nice monitor and has good signs of long life. Is there a video card capable of costing less than a new BMW and adjustable or compatable with this fixed frequency monitor or am I flogging a dead horse? Lynn I personally don't have the knoweledge to be of any use, but I would suggest a trip to a local monitor specialty shop (yup, every town has one, to do warranty work on monitors if nothing else). Most of these guys also dabble in buying old workstation monitors and adapting them for PC use, which in a strange way, is sort of the situation you have. If they want to help out, I'm sure you'll get a solution cheaper then the $600 for a new card. It's worth a shot. Morris 12/17/97(Q) I have an old VGA (not SVGA) monitor, with a PCI video driver with 1MG memory. Whenever I try to switch the screen mode to 256 color or high color mode, it goes crazy, but with a very old DOS program, I can set it to a 512x480 resolution, and highcolor mode. I've tried to get a driver that allows me to do that in windows 95, but it has been impossible. Is there such a driver? can it be built? I know the monitor is capable of showing 64k colors, because it does show them in DOS mode, but there's no way I can get it to work on windows 95. Fonseca (A) The monitor is capable of showing an infinite number of colors, since the guns are responding to an analog signal. The problem with your video cardsis that when going to high color modes, the driver wants to step up the scan frequency at the same time, to something the monitor won't support. Can such a driver be built? Sure, but why? Can you find one for Windows 95? Probably not for your PCI card, but if you back off to an older ISA SVGA card you might be able to find one that does 256 colors on a plain VGA monitor. It seems to me that the Trident cards (9000 and 8900) both had a 256 color VGA driver. Morris 12/1/97(Q) Composite question drawn from several similar questions over the weekend. I have just upgraded my PC with a new motherboard (or hard drive, or sound card, or modem), and now nothing come up on the screen, (or the system freezes after counting RAM without beeps or an error message) on boot. How do I proceed? Composite (A) In all instances, when you can't get as far as an on screen error message, you should strip the PC down to the bare bones and see if the problem goes away. Bare bones requirements to light up the screen are a motherboard, CPU, one bank of RAM, power supply, video card, monitor and keyboard. If you still can't get as far as text on the screen, one of these parts is bad, or improperly installed. Once you have a "live" screen, start putting the other parts back in ONE AT A TIME, until you either find the problem, or have a working system. Morris 10/15/97(Q) We have an old liquid crystal projector at school that we would like to use with our stand alone CD ROM units. The problem is that the video-in on the projector has a BNC setup instead of the 9 or 16 pin port that the CD ROMs use. Is there any convertor available the make the two compatable? If so, where can one be found? Tony (A) I'm guessing here that by CD ROM units, you mean PCs that have CD ROMs in them? Also, while there were 9 pin video ports still in use about 8 years ago, I'm going to guess that this is a free COM port, which you don't want to plug into. The standard VGA port is 15 pins, and there is a standard 15pin to 5 coax cable you can use, which you can buy at a monitor repair shop. You can also make one if you have an ambitious tech type.
Morris 9/18/97(Q) I have a CompuAdd 386DX with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1. I use the internet from MCI. One of our children was playing in Windows setup and changed the video setup which was a set up for 256 colors and was able to bring down the internet graphics nicely. Whatever she choose brought up a snow screen and I had to reload windows under the vga set up. Now the internet graphics look like negatives. The old SYSTEM.INI had displayinf=oemo.inf and display.drv=et4000 640x480 256 col. Now I have 386grabber=vga.3gr and display.drv=vga.drv. I have no idea where the ET4000 came from unless it was with a BOCA modem that I returned after loading. I cannot locate any driver disk. I did look for some info on the screen when loading per your note in chapter one and see display=1mb. Any suggestions on how to get back to 256 color? Frank (A) With a 1MB VGA card, you should be able to vew 16million colors at 640x480 res, though 256 is ample for the web. ET4000 looks familiar, it could be the Tseng 4000 chip set, a popular video card in older years. At any rate, you need to reinstall the driver for the card, which isn't on the Windows disks. If you don't have another floppy disk floating around that says Display Driver, TSENG 4000, or something like that on it, then we must make sure what card you have, and download it off the web. The first place to look is at boot time, where you identified the 1MB. The card manufacturer or chipset name should be identified on the same line. If not, you can type "MSD" as the DOS prompt, and the card should be identified under the VGA button. Best all in one website for driver index is www.drivershq.com Morris 9/16/97(Q) I have a 133 MHz IBM-clone with 16 MB of RAM. I'm running MS-DOS v. 6, Windows 3.1, MS Word, Excel, Eudora Light, Netscape 3.01, etc. Recently, I've gotten a blank monitor, no cursor. When I reset the computer or completely reboot it immediately, I still have a blank monitor although I can hear the HD running. After a coupla' hours (usually overnight), I can reboot and the machine comes up like normal and everything seems to operate fine (until the next time this happens). Just before this started occurring, I downloaded the 4.02 version of Netscape Navigator. This "blackout" has occurred a few times after getting off the Internet and shutting off the external modem. Is this a coincidence? Where do you expect the problem lies? Do I just wait until it fails completely? The failure has been intermittent and inconsistent. Bob (A) The first test to make is to boot up, go to Windows, then walk away from it and see if the screen eventually fails. If it does, you can rule out any oddball connections to software, modem activity, etc.. The next thing to check is if the computer is actually dead, or if you've just lost video. Get out of windows by typing blindly, <Alt-F> followed by <X>, then a <Enter> to get past the "Do you want to exit Windows" prompt, should do it. This will produce a lot of hard drive activity, blinking the HDD LED, etc. Also, back in DOS, you can always type "DIR A:", get some real noise out of the thing. This also eliminates Windows drivers as a possibility, because the character based VGA screen used in DOS is strictly hardware implementation. Assuming we still have a blank screen, but have shown the computer is up, eliminating motherboard, power supply, etc, the only options left are the VGA card and the monitor. The video card should produce a beep code if it fails at boot, but not if the problem is actually with the final D/A converter stage. The last check, asside from simply swapping monitors or VGA cards, is to leave the system box powered up, but turn off the monitor overnight. If it comes on the next morning, the problem is the monitor, if not, the VGA card. Morris 9/8/97(Q) I have been using a PROMISE EIDE2300 PLUS VLB i/o card with no problem until I upgraded my ISA video card with a VLB video card. My screen goes blank soon after I bootup. I can hear the hard drive so I know system is not locked up. A tech at PROMISE said i may need to change "wait state" since I'm using 2 VLB slots now. I don't have a manual for my motherboard and I don't know what to do. Eurich (A) Usually the jumper position on the motherboard is silkscreened, look for a wait0/wait1 looking thing. Sometimes you can diddle the bus timing in the CMOS setup. Outside of that, I'd lose the PROMISE and stick in an ISA IDE. VESA benefits video a lot more than IDE, and I've seen a ton of anecdotal evidence that multiple VESA cards in a system hasten the death of either the CPU or each other. Morris 8/26/97(Q) My system is an IBM Clone 486dx/33 with 20 meg of ram (which I recently upgraded from 8 meg). The processor is an Intel and I have on my mother board a Pentium socket which I am wondering about upgrading. The reason for the upgrade is that I recently bought a program that said I needed 66mhz or faster and 256 color svga card. My card is suppose to be 256 color svga card, but I have not been able to get more that the standard vga setting from Win95. The card came with 1meg and can be upgraded to 2meg. Jerry (A) Upgrading the VGA memory won't help, a 1MB, you have enough for True color (16 Million colors, at VGA resolution). You need to find the web site of the VGA card manufacturer and install the proper driver in Windows 95. On upgrading the motherboard, forget it. The upgrade sockets on all but a handfull of the newest 486 motherboards are useless, and those cases where they are good, you can buy a new motherboard and faster Pentium for less than the special upgrade CPU. If you want to stay with the motherboard, pick up a 486DX2/66 Intel CPU for $30 or so, mailorder, and it will probably be OK. The faster 486's may be too much for your motherboard, unless you have doc stating otherwise, or jumper settings for faster clocks silk screened on the motherboard. Morris 7/28/97(Q) My son changed the video settings on my pc at home, a 486-100 running Win 95, attempting to increase the resolution. Now the monitor will not display anything and I don't know how to get into the control panel to change the setting back. How can I change it back? Bob (A) You should be able to boot in "Safe Mode", which loads the 16 color VGA driver. To get into safe mode, start tapping the <F8> key after after the memory count finishes. When you catch it right, you'll get a short text menu with boot options. Choose "Safe Mode", go into "Control Panel", "Display", and reset to a lower resolution that the card actually supports. Morris 7/21/97(Q) My Monitor seems too dim.It is not the graphics card as I have tried it with someone elses monitor and it was fine. Also, I can bump up the brightness in some games as they have there own gamma correction utility, however Windows does not have this sort of utility. Are there any utilities or fixes that I could use to bump up the brightness as I am loath to buy a new monitor without this one going bust. Greg (A) Since VGA monitors are analog, the brightness is taken from the strength of the signals for RGB (Red, Green and Blue). The only other signals passed to the monitor are horizontal and vertical sync. If you experiment with different drivers in Windows (more or less colors), you'll probably find that those using less colors give you a brighter picture. I've never heard of a general purpose utility for doing this, although if you check the web site of you adapter manufacturer, you may find that they have a DOS memory resident calibration routine. Even though the other monitor worked fine with your card, it may just have a greater range of sensitivity, meaning another video card might do the trick (worth trying if you have one around). Finally, dim monitor problems are usually due the the power supply section of the monitor, something you don't want to fiddle with if you haven't been trained. However, if you can dig up a thin plastic (non-conductive blade) screwdriver , if you look carefully through the sides and back of the monitor with a flahlight, you may find some adjustable pots you can diddle (with the monitor powered up and the case on), and you might be able to effect an adjustment. You might also lose sync or ruin your color balance and have trouble getting back to your starting point. Don't take the monitor case off unless you're all paid up on your life insurance and the wife is tired of you. Morris 7/14/97(Q) Hi, I have a 486dx33 with 16mb ram, a cirrus logis 5426 video card with 2 mb ram and when I try to run windows with 64k or 16.7Million colors, my icons are turned black and I get a message that sys extremely low on memory? Why does this happen? Can you please help? Secondly, I have another computer identical to this one with only 8mb ram, 1 mb video card and this message never occurs? Nelson (A) Good problem. I'd seen it on my old Cirrus card (a 1MB 1528) in the past and settled for a work-around. I re-created the problem today on my 1MB Trident, and ran into the same limits. These are: 19 icons per window at 16 million colors, and 28 icons per window at 64K colors. The screen resolution (640x480) or (1024x768) has no effect on these limits. Neither do any of the settings I diddled with in config.sys. So, the work-around is to split your large program groups into 2 smaller groups. I'll continue looking into a more proper "fix", but given the fact that you can still have multiple windows open on the desktop, I'm suspicious that it may be a hard-limit problem with the way .grp files are loaded by given video drivers, nor do I find the work-around terribly inconvienient since you can still have access to all of your icons by tileing the open windows. Please let me know if your observations are different. The easiest way I found to test the limits is to highlight an icon in "Accessories" and hit "F8" to copy, followed by return, which lets you run up the number of icons in a matter of seconds. The limit reached this way is the same as the limit reached when Windows is started with a large window open on the desktop, but you get to avoid having icon blackouts because the system will refuse to go over the limit. Morris |