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Thrilling Web Adventures of a Retired Tech Guru

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Christina Sng retired after a long and illustrious career as a usability consultant, site producer, information architect, and web developer. Retirement, however, is boring! Join her here on her continuing adventures on the web.

This happened to me twice. Once on my Lenovo and today again on hubby’s desktop. After booting and running the Windows start up screen, the monitor blanks out. Something about analog or digital. I just wanted to shake the monitor into waking up again.

Anyway, with the laptop it was easy since it works with an inbuilt screen already. Just fiddle with the display settings and install an updated driver and that usually works. But what if you can’t see a damn thing on the screen with the desktop?

On XP, while booting up, press F8 and you’ll be faced with a whole bunch of choices on how you want to boot up. Choose VGA mode and lo and behold, that errant screen will display your desktop, albeit in 640×480.

Windows will most likely let you know this isn’t the ideal display setting but even if it doesn’t, just right-click your desktop and head to Properties -> Settings. Check out your resolution and see if you can change it to your desired one. If it doesn’t work, go disable and re-enable your monitor driver. That did the trick for me.

I’m gonna claim a nice reward tomorrow now that hubby can play Warcraft III again. :D

(Credit: Vista Forums)

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