Just Fucking Weird

NoCo, you should enjoy this.

I bought my grandson an Alienware computer for his seventeenth birthday about six months ago. Recently, the monitor developed a problem of stuck pixels - a nice orange stripe going down the right side of the display. Not uncommon. I called Alienware support and they shipped a replacement monitor. The monitor he had was not longer available, so they shipped a nicer one that retails for almost a hundred bucks more. Good deal -- so far.

He came over and picked up the new monitor, went home and hooked it up, then called me to say it wasn't working. When the computer is turned on, the monitor displays the computer name and the bios version, then goes black. He plugged in the old monitor and it worked fine (except for the stuck pixels, of course). New monitor is bad, right?

Today, he brought the computer and monitor over here. Yep, it was acting just as he had said. The cable is HDMI, and the computer has two HDMI ports: one on the NVIDIA video card and one in the case (using the Intel chip set). When I moved the cable from the video card to the case, everything worked fine. Bad video card, right?

Further farting round, showed that with the cable plugged into the video card, the monitor turned black at the point where the log in screen should have appeared. If the password was entered after that point, the computer continued booting Windows and the monitor lit up just as it should. After booting into Windows, the cable could be moved back to the video card port and it worked fine. Windows problem, right?

Well, we know it wasn't a bad monitor, because it worked perfectly when plugged into my computer (which has the same video card), and when plugged into the Intel port on his computer.

We know it wasn't a bad video card, because it worked fine after booting.

We know (or suspect) that it wasn't a Windows problem, because the old monitor worked fine with the same system software.

In other words, everything worked fine...except it didn't.

Because the monitor would work properly after the log-in password was entered, I decided to remove the requirement for a password and see how it would work. Now comes the Windows problem. I removed the check mark that said a password was required. Rather than removing the password prompt, it added another user with the same name and the same password. However, the monitor now lit up properly at the password prompt, asking for the password of the new (same) user.

Now the monitor was working properly, but the computer was booting very slowly and there was a duplicate user. The only way to find the problem was to remove the new user and take it back to the original configuration. Looking through the system, I could find no evidence that the new user existed. Finally, I just went back and checked the box that said a password was required (remember, I had removed that check mark).

Now, the new user was gone, and the god damned computer is working perfectly. The monitor works properly and the computer boots very quickly. Everything is just right. And I have no fucking idea what the problem was.

Screen resolution, or refresh rate or something like that.  

Guessing here:

The computer logo and BIOS version are displaying at something universal like 640x480, then the video card kicks into super HD (1920x1280) for the login screen.  If the new screen won't do that resolution it displays black.

The case HDMI port is limited to normal HD (1280x1080) so it works with the monitor most of the time.  But the NVIDIA card goes above & beyond that, which the monitor didn't like.  Maybe it can be configured.

Anyway, you might play around with what resolutions are available and which are supported.  As a gaming console there's probably a pretty high top-end (4K?)

That all sounds reasonable, but the monitors are both 1920x1080. At any rate, the video card adjusts to the monitor. I believe the Intel port supports 4K. I plugged in an old 15-inch monitor with a lower max resolution and it worked just fine.

I checked all the settings on the monitor, because there were a couple that might have caused the problem, but they were all correct.

Another one of those unsolved mysteries, I guess.

Angels in the architecture, ghosts in the machine.

_Howard wrote:

Windows

Or this.

What took you so long?

I tried to resist the urge.

I really did.

I could tell. And I appreciate it.

A man's only got so much strength.

Further farting around with the kid's computer leads me to believe that the problem is because the on-board video is enabled as well as the nvidia card. Why it did not occur before the monitor swap I cannot figure out. My computer has the same nvidia card, but the on-board controller is disabled in the bios.

I am far more cautious with other computers than with my own, so I am hesitant to start making driver changes.

Ever do dual-monitor? I had one at work.

Some people swear by them but I had a hard time not losing stuff.

I've had dual monitors for many years. Right now I have a 24-inch and a 22-inch.

It occurs to me that I have three outputs on my video card: HDMI, VGA, and DVI. The on-board video has a DisplayPort connection. Hmmm. Wonder if I could have four monitors.


I finally decided to go into the BIOS and see what was available. They had a setting for video preference and I changed it from "auto" to "discrete." Took care of all the problems. I still don't know why there was no problem with the other monitor. Something in the driver, I suppose.


Alienware support called me a while ago to see if I had everything working okay. Good support, no matter what one thinks of Windows boxes.