Today has mostly been about getting my two monitors to work together again. Last Friday I disabled my at-the-time-completely-functional dual-monitor setup and plugged in my TV so I could watch movies laying in my bed.
Yesterday I plugged my second monitor back in and my original setup, that had worked only a few days earlier, didn’t recognize my second monitor at all and even though I had unplugged my TV it was still there in both the Nvidia control panel and Windows Display properties. I could still activate the TV and set it up with what resolution, screen position e.t.c even though it was unplugged. My main problem was however that I couldn’t get my secondary monitor to work.
Specs:
CPU:
Intel Duo 6850
RAM:
4GB Kingston ram
GPU:
Geforce 8800GTS 640mb
Monitors:
Viewsonic 2216V
Viewsonic VX2025
OS: Windows XP SP2
Let me just state this: I am not a computer whizz but I can build a computer from the ground up (not including making the actual components, of course) and I consider myself to be a fairly logical, if at times a bit slow, person. I have a rather extensive experience with faulty computers due to the fact that I have been around them for the majority of my life. If you are experiencing a similar problem to the one described here but is something of a complete and utter noob when dealing with computer software and hardware, I am TELLING YOU not to follow in my foot steps. And even if you do, I in no way take any responsibility for any miss-haps that may happen.
Back to the problem at hand:
First I’ll go trough everything I did. At the bottom you’ll find the short version of what actually worked.
First I googled after a similar problem but I was unable to find someone in the same situation. I found a few people complaining about the new Nvidia drivers when using Dual monitors but the main complaint was that scaling was a bit weird for alot of people on the secondary monitor. I had the same problem earlier and I solved that by simply installing older drivers, just as suggested in most threads.
For the problem at hand, there was very little information and I was unable to find anyone with the same problem. At this point I turned to the Windows help-section but under all my years using a computer I have never found valid help there and more than anything it just adds to the frustration. A quick look left my not knowing what to do and at this point I realized I just had to manually unplug, switch cables and systematic just see if it could be a cable that was faulty. Luckily I have two sets of DVI-cables and two sets of VGA-cables so I could switch between monitors. Between unplugging and plugging in monitors I turned off my computer between each switch.
For a period of time, in the midst of the switching both my monitors stopped showing anything after windows had loaded. I plugged back the TV and it turned out that in some magical way my TV, that was unplugged, had become the primary monitor. I simply switched it back so my primary monitor was my primary monitor but at this point I was rather fed up.
How I got it to work:
I went to the device manager, uninstalled all monitors, graphic cards along with the drivers using Add/remove programs in the control panel. I downloaded Forceware 163.75, after I had read that they were recommended as “Stable and good drivers”. I turned my computer off and unplugged my secondary monitor and the TV. Back in Windows, I installed Forceware 163.75 drivers and restarted upon request. When I got back in windows I simply switched from one DVI-cable to the other, plugged it in (while still in Windows, even thought I know you really shouldn’t) and Windows simply detected it, installed it and it worked fine.
I may come to update this post if/when I want to watch something off my computer on my TV again.