Help... Computer weirdness!

[_Al_]

One of the PCs in our office has gone mad.

It's a bastard (as in, illegitiate child) HP/compaq thing.

For some reason BIOS, the XP startup screen and several menus all appear with the top 5cm of the screen at the bottom of the screen, a 2cm black line above that, then the rest of the screen; with some more missing at the top, for good measure.


Anyone know which bit needs replacing?

[Bonce]

Try a different monitor on it.

[GregE240]

Sounds like the magnets have failed in the monitor, as Bonce alludes to.

[Jinx]

Vertical hold been played with? Either that or it could well be kaput as has been alluded to already.

[_Al_]

But it only happens on those screens.

The normal windows desktop is fine...


I can't adjust the monitor far enough to bring it back to normal, and adjusting the windows display settings does nothing.

[Podie]

Sounds like incorrect DOS drivers for the monitor to me...

[Jinx]

Podie said:

Sounds like incorrect DOS drivers for the monitor to me...

Agree it seems the normal (bound to get flamed here) EGA dos drivers are now corrupt (or the graphics card has developed a fault and cannot support the EGA mode).

[malman]

I think XP uses some pretty weird resolutions on the startup screens. I have a projector at work which dispays the res value during a mode switch and on XP it comes up with 720 X 356 (not sure of exact figures as I'm on holiday at the moment). Its attached to a Compaq D510 with the nvdia card I think. Maybe your monitor is just not syncing properly.

Does XP use a VGA driver during boot? I thought it would just use BIOS calls until its told what card it has and which drivers to use the switch to those for desktop etc.

Not something I've ever had a problem with so never looked closely really

[malman]

Ahhh EGA those were the days. Also know as the Excellent Graphics Adapter especially if your only other choice was mono/hercules or CGA. Also known as Crap Graphics Adapter