Display Settings not saving

Nalz

Hi all

I recently was doing a little clean up on the PC back home(Windows XP), I uninstalled ne or two programs from add/remove programs and defragged the hard disk. I didnt remove anything of importance, just one or two games and music/photo software etc. Anyhow I restarted the machine and the resolution is set to 800x600 and 8bit colour settings. I try to alter this and apply the changes but upon re-start it reverts back to those low settings. There seems to be no issues with any drivers in the device manager so I dont know what to do

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks
Trilla

seamus

Sounds like you removed the display drivers when you were uninstalling stuff. Many display drivers come as a big suite of applications now, and when you remove the suite, you remove the drivers too.

Do you know what type of card it has?

Nalz

Not sure, think is NVIDIA or something like that. The graphics card menu is available when you right click the desktop (anolog display option) just above properties and there is no caution icons in the device manager list.

Nalz

Okay I so Re-installed the drivers(GeForce Series) but no joy. The only other information I can give is that a mate a mine was messing around on Ashampoo Power Tool and its possible a setting could be altered in this.

Anyhow it doesnt seem like a driver issue, I can change the setting once windows loads up, but it wont save the setting.

tech

post a pic of device manager for us ok

Nalz

Hey Tech! Not currently on my pc but there is nothing wrong in Device manager. No yellow exclamation marks or issues. Strange one

Nalz

giving this one a final bump...can anyone shed light on this issue? AFter re-installing the the drivers and nothing wrong in the device manager Im really stuck after that. Ive tried altering the settings both in the Windows Display and the Nvidia software itself.

thanks all anyway for the help!

8T8

Boot into Windows safe mode go into the device manager and right click on the monitor/display first and select uninstall, now do the same for the graphics adapter & reboot into normal Windows and see if anything changes. It may require one more reboot after the re-install of the drivers.

Nalz

No joy 8T8. The drivers re-installed no bother, and yet it still reverts to 8bti and 800x600 res at start up. Im at a loss at this stage, dont know what it is. Thanks anyway lads.

kaizersoze

Did you try a 'system restore'?

SickBoy

By any chance is MSN Messenger starting when you logon?
I had a problem with a friends system a few months ago where his display would revert to 8bit colour 800x600 whenever he logged on. When I logged in as admin it was fine. One by one I went through the apps set to auto start and I found it was MSN Messenger that was causing it. I didn't try and investigate it much, just upgraded to Windows Live Messenger and the problem went away.
Hope this helps...

Nalz

Well, kind of the opposite. I stopped it starting up in msconfig - startup, as it takes a while to startup with msn. Maybe I'll reset that, but Ive don this before and it didnt effect it. I'll try this when i get home thanks.

Nalz

Again no joy..at this stage I'm looking at throwing everything on to the external hardDrive and doing a clean wipe and re-install

Kimbot

Can you try the graphics card in another system??
Also is there onboard graphics on the motherboard?? If so make sure in the bios that the graphics is set to AGP/PCI etc.

Soundman

Trilla wrote:

Well, kind of the opposite. I stopped it starting up in msconfig - startup, as it takes a while to startup with msn. Maybe I'll reset that, but Ive don this before and it didnt effect it. I'll try this when i get home thanks.

When you were disabling things in msconfig did you disable anything regarding Nvidia? You may have stopped something that is needed for full graphics options from starting.

Nalz

Soundman wrote:

When you were disabling things in msconfig did you disable anything regarding Nvidia? You may have stopped something that is needed for full graphics options from starting.

Nope, sure there was only msn and 2 others starting up on msconfig, the rest had been disabled before and the display worked fine.

SickBoy

Trilla can you confirm that when you change the resolution and colour depth to your desired settings they apply fine and the problem is that the settings are not saved when you log off/log on?
This would eliminate the card as the cause..

Nalz

SickBoy wrote:

Trilla can you confirm that when you change the resolution and colour depth to your desired settings they apply fine and the problem is that the settings are not saved when you log off/log on?
This would eliminate the card as the cause..

Yep can confirm that.

I can change the settings after Op sys loads up
I can access the cards software
I uninstalled some photo software and one or two games, but drivers for card remain on system
There is nothing wrong (with anything on machine) according to device manger
There is nothing in startup disabled that would effect resolution and colour

Cheers
Trilla

SickBoy

Ok I know you explained earlier that MSN Messenger was no longer starting up automatically but to rule it out totally, upgrade it to the latest version "Windows Live Messenger". You've nothing to loose except maybe regaining normality with your system
As I said earlier, it worked for me...