Monitor out of sync

I’ve got a big problem. When I start up windows my monitor tells me it’s out of sync and I see nothing else. I had this issue a week ago when I tried to play Tony Hawk 3 and every time I started the game I would get a similar message, but then I could just press alt-f4 and return to windows. This time I started a program that somehow didn’t drop me back into windows resolution when I exited it, and the only way I’m able to use my computer now is through the fail-safe mode, or whatever you call it.

My monitor is a Samtron 95P Plus. When I got the issues with Tony Hawk I looked into my monitor drivers, and in some way they had been uninstalled, my monitor showing up as a generic monitor. I couldn’t find my old driver disk, so I downloaded new drivers from Samtron’s website, but their install program wouldn’t work. I haven’t tried anything since.

What can I do to make my monitor work properly again?

In my experiance this is almost always caused by either setting the resolution or the refresh rate too high. If you don’t have the monitor drivers, the monitor may be confused about what it’s highest available refresh rate/resolution is, so you ought to go for lower settings than usual until you get it sorted. See what you can do to get the drivers to install correctly.

See if it’ll let you remove the monitor in the safe mode device manager. If that doesn’t work, uninstall the video driver from safe mode and try again.

Resinstalling my video card drivers seems to have done the trick, temporarily at least, but that still leaves with without drivers for my monitor. The drivers available from Samtron are apparently not made for WinXP/2000, which could explain the error message I get druing installation. As far as the device manager is concerned, my monitor does not show up there at all, neither during safe mode nor in normal mode(!)

Monitor “drivers” do nothing more than list the maximum resolution and refresh rates of a monitor. In XP Home, I actually went and hacked up the monitor drivers to add my ancient Gateway 2000 monitor into the list. Sure, it then complained about “unsigned drivers”, but wahh.

You should just be able to get into advanced display properties, hit “List All Modes”, and manually pick the highest refresh rate/res that you like. If you pick the wrong one, just hit escape.

Small correction: the Sony LCD drivers I’m currently using also install their own color profile, to match the display characteristics of the monitor.

Just being pedantic. :)

Could you tell me how to do that?

You should just be able to get into advanced display properties, hit “List All Modes”, and manually pick the highest refresh rate/res that you like. If you pick the wrong one, just hit escape.

I can still do that, of course, but that doesn’t prevent my monitor from going apeshit the next time some program decides to use the maximum allowed resolution and I don’t have a limit in place.

Even if you have the defaults set, it doesn’t always protect you from poorly written software.

Even if you have the defaults set, it doesn’t always protect you from poorly written software.[/quote]

You’re probably right, but I never had any issues before I noticed that my monitor drivers had disappeared.

Since my monitor decided to appear in the device manager today I managed to actually install the downloaded drivers after a bit of experimentation, but they don’t seem to work like before. I can’t get the option to only show refresh rates that my monitor can handle like I could earlier. I don’t know, at times like these I feel my computer knowledge is woefully inadequate, on the other hand it works and I suppose I shouldn’t complain so much now that I’ve gotten this far.