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jonah
.,
OS: WinXP SP2 with all updates
Video card: Gforce FX 5200
Monitor Envision 775e
First off, I totally believe this is an OS problem based on the troubleshooting I've done, if the mods feel this would be better in another forum please move it. Thank you.
O.K. This is probably going to sound like an easy one, but it's got me stumped. Up until yesterday everything worked fine, until I unplugged my monitor in order to test another machine, when I plugged it back into my main machine I only had 640x480 graphics (this was at the login screen.)
When I logged in and went to video settings the only options I had were 640x480 and 800x600, but couldn't move the slider to 800x600. The only color quality available was 4 bit. I removed the display adaptor from device manager along with the monitor. On reboot everything looked normal (I had all resolution options available in settings), windows detected a vga controller, but not my actual card. I then installed my video card drivers, on reboot I was back to 640x480.
I removed the display adaptor and rebooted, it returned to a normal screen. I loaded older drivers and I went back to 640x480.
I booted to safe mode (with the fx5200 drivers still installed) and everything was normal, device manager says it's using fx5200 drivers. Display settings says it's default monitor on FX 5200 (I'm pretty sure I've always just used default monitor, but I found and loaded the envision drivers and got the same results). I don't have any options for refresh settings other that 60hz with either the default monitor loaded or the envision.
I then removed display adaptor, and clean booted, all looked normal but again only detected vga compatible card, loaded drivers and back to 640x480.
I turned off all services except those that were running in safe mode and tested again. Same results.
removed display adaptor, booted to safe mode and loaded drivers in safe mode. On reboot I was still at 640x480.
At this point I'm thinking maybe my card fried (but it works in safe mode), so I put in an older gforce 2 gts. Windows loaded but only found a vga compatible card, not my actual card (resolution was fine). Loaded the GTS drivers and I went back to 640x480.
I then put both cards into another winxp machine (different harddrive), windows detected each of them for what they were (the FX5200 or GTS) and loaded drivers automaticly. I then pulled the harddrive from the machine that wasn't working and tried it in another machine (thinking it might be a MB are AGP slot problem. As soon as I booted up, it again only detected a VGA compatible card (normal resolution) and as soon as I loaded drivers I went to 640x480.
There may have been some other steps in here that I tried but I don't remember them as I've been through this many times.
So at this point, I'm totally stumped. Anybody have any ideas. I'm not ready to reinstall OS yet, but getting close.
Thanks in advance.

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