John Hendow

Teri and I replaced our ancient CRT computer monitors this weekend, opting for identical LCD units. Both of our office computers were in need of upgrades, so this was a welcome change from our old units. The new monitors are much thinner and lighter than our old tube-based units, and look very nice. Teri’s upgrade was much easier than mine. It seemed like all she had to do was plug it in and everything was working beautifully.

My computer was a little more difficult…

Here is what happened:

1. We each unpacked the monitors and hooked them up. I’m a total cable-routing neat freak, so all the cables under my computer desk are carefully wrapped and secured to keep them tidy. Since I was replacing my old monitor and didn’t want to reroute all the cables, I just used my existing fancy, expensive, shielded video cable and my old monitor’s power cable.
2. I installed the monitor driver and looked at the desktop. It definitely needed drivers, which were provided with the monitor on a CD. Installation required some manual steps, but no big deal.
3. Since it’s a widescreen monitor, the recommended screen resolution is 1440 x 900 pixels. No problem. Except the video card in my computer didn’t list that option. Likely this is because the stock AGP video card in my current machine is pretty ho-hum.
4. My old (and mostly dead) computer had a fairly nice 256 MB AGP video card, which I installed for gaming purposes. I mean research. And science stuff. Not gaming.
5. So I swapped out the video card and rebooted. Now I had a number of new options for video settings, but none of them were 1440 x 900. Strange…
6. I selected one that seemed close to that resolution. My screen went black and the monitor displayed a message indicated the resolution was “out of range”. Usually under such circumstances, the screen resolution dialog will give you a few seconds to confirm that you want to keep the new resolution, and in if you do do nothing it will auto-switch back to the previous setting.
7. Naturally, this auto-switch didn’t happen. Thus began the cursing.
8. I rebooted to no avail. The video resolution was set to configuration that the monitor wouldn’t display. And since I couldn’t view the desktop, I couldn’t change it back. 
9. I rebooted in safe mode which allowed me to see my desktop. I switched the monitor setting back to 800 x 600 and rebooted normally.
10. Nope. The system was still set to the high resolution and the monitor displayed its helpful message. More cursing. More rebooting in safe mode. Same issue.
11. Drivers! Teri is smart. She recommended I reboot in safe mode and make sure the video card drivers were installed. Good idea. I did this, which meant searching online for a driver and installing it.
12. Upon reboot, I was delighted to discover that I could now see my desktop. Hooray! Except the option for 1440 x 900 was still not available.
13. Drivers again! Did I mention Teri is smart? I got the CD for the monitor driver and tried to reinstall. It claimed the driver did not exist on the CD. I went directly to the file location on the CD where I had found the original driver, and it wasn’t there! More cursing ensued.
14. The dim light bulb in my head began to glow… could our two CDs be slightly different, even though our monitors are identical? I tried the other CD, and it worked. Hooray! Now I was getting somewhere. Apparently this was the CD that came packed with my monitor. I labeled it for future reference.
15. With both the video card and the monitor drivers updated, I rebooted.
16. And to my not-so-great delight, I discovered the 1440 x 900 video resolution was still not available. It goes without saying that there was cursing.
17. In desperation, I swapped out my video cable. Back in step #1 I decided to use my fancy, expensive, shielded cable since it was already neatly routed under the desk. I replaced it with the skinny stock cable provided with the monitor.
18. And suddenly everything worked correctly. I set the resolution to 1440 x 900 and it’s beautiful.

A post-cursing examination of the video cable provided an important clue: my fancy, expensive, shielded cable doesn’t have all its pins! This isn’t uncommon, as most monitors don’t use them all. However, our new LCDs apparently rely on having all those pins present. My guess is that if I’d just used the new monitor cable to begin with, steps 6-17 could have been avoided. 

Feh.

Well, at least I have a fancy new monitor now…