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Question

Problem connecting Philips monitor to Dell running XP SP3

Oct 24, 2014 11:01PM PDT

Replacement monitor Philips type 246V5LHAB. Current monitor is a Dell P991 (as we say - "on the blink") with a Radeon 256 MByte Hypermemory X600 graphics card. Have used the drivers from the CD supplied and from the Philips support site - I have used the Windows 7 drivers (all the implications for the drivers are that XP is supported) - all the the attempted installations fail with a message "A service installation section of the .inf is invalid" Any thoughts?

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Answer
This happened to me.
Oct 25, 2014 2:37AM PDT

I used google on the issue and in the end had to re-install XP SP3 along with all the drivers. Fortunately for me I keep notes on that last XP machine on how to do that. The exact steps vary with each PC.
Bob

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Problem connecting Philips monitor to Dell running XP SP3
Oct 27, 2014 1:43AM PDT
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You could try that.
Oct 27, 2014 1:58AM PDT

The thing is, that a monitor doesn't really use a driver. The video card takes a driver and the monitor takes the monitor.inf to let Windows XP know its capabilities.

Forgive me here but given the decade plus of content about this I'll hit highlights and may not go into much depth over how XP works with video cards and VGA displays.

That is, XP's own resolutions come from the video card so let's read a link to show how to show more than what the stock dialog shows. I put that up at:
http://forums.cnet.com/7723-19688_102-381848/the-netbook-tips-1920-x-1080-pixels-and-other-tips/?tag=contentBody;threadListing

So there it is. The monitor driver has never been required. But today's users are often exploding when they get on this old PC.
Bob