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Post by OziRiS on May 27, 2014 12:39:03 GMT
Sadly Denmark is a bit too far to throw a cable over  I've managed to collect about a dozen of vga cables and about 10 dvi ones.... That's okay  c64 just solved my whole problem with testing both the PC and the cable. Just remembered I've had the PC hooked up to the TV via that cable not too long ago and there were no problems. The auto adjust problem with the PC monitor existed at that time as well. It just wasn't as bad as it is now. So, cable and PC are okay. Problem is the monitor itself. Thanks c64 Next step now is to either prise the damn thing apart and see if I can fix it or just buy a new monitor. I won't be doing either until next month, since I can't afford a new monitor right now and having one that auto adjusts every now and then is still better than having no monitor at all. |
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Post by GTCGreg on May 27, 2014 13:09:57 GMT
If it is getting worse with time, it's probably that capacitor problem I mentioned in an earlier post. This is a very common problem in just about everything that uses switching power supplies. It's caused by under rated caps. If you do ever get it apart, here's what to look for. If you're not experienced at soldering, you may be able to find someone to help you. $2 for new capacitors is a lot better than $100 for a new monitor.  |
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Post by OziRiS on May 27, 2014 13:31:43 GMT
If it is getting worse with time, it's probably that capacitor problem I mentioned in an earlier post. This is a very common problem in just about everything that uses switching power supplies. It's caused by under rated caps. If you do ever get it apart, here's what to look for. If you're not experienced at soldering, you may be able to find someone to help you. $2 for new capacitors is a lot better than $100 for a new monitor. Except I also need to buy a soldering iron and spend time finding a place where I can buy the capasitors, which will probably be online, since we don't have a lot of stores here that sell stuff like that. Danes have apparently become so lazy when it comes to fixing our own stuff, be that vacuum cleaners, TVs or toasters, that no one can make money selling parts anymore. Most people who on occasion fix their own things (such as myself) often have to either improvise, scavenge in dumps or wait for ages to have the parts shipped from abroad. Besides, who wants to spend hours on end frustrating themselves with finding out what's wrong with the toaster and then spending additional time getting the parts, repairing it and still end up with a product that's - at least to some extent - worse than it was before it broke, when you can buy a new toaster for $10 that'll easily live for 3-5 years and maybe even a lot more? I've spent hours on end taking apart and fixing our old dryer. Most of the fixes were improvised, as the individual parts cost almost half of what a new dryer would. When we finally bought a new dryer about a month ago, it was partly because two of the parts I'd fixed earlier had gone completely off the deep end, one more had died and all three needed to be replaced at a total price of around $400 and partly because I just didn't want to waste more time on it. For an extra $50 I got a brand new dryer with a 4 year warranty that makes less noise (down from 70 dB to 64 dB), dries the clothes better, doesn't use as much energy and it was delivered faster than the spare parts for the old one would have been. Not to mention that I saved the time it would have taken to get the old one fixed. I'm all for fixing things myself - if nothing else, learning how stuff works is just plain old fun - but sometimes you have to do a bit of cost benefit analasys and just admit to yourself that it's not worth the time and effort. |
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Post by GTCGreg on May 27, 2014 13:40:23 GMT
Well, your time is certainly worth something. I'm just pointing out what the problem could be. I don't know if you have any Radio Shack stores in your area, but the RS stores here do carry a lot of values of these types of capacitors.
In any even, if you do occasionally tinker with broken electronics gear, It's something to watch for. It's not just a problem with computer monitors, but pretty much all electronics that use switching power supplies. It's pretty easy to diagnose. You don't even need any test equipment to find the problem. Just your eyes.
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Post by OziRiS on May 27, 2014 13:46:55 GMT
Well, your time is certainly worth something. I'm just pointing out what the problem could be. I don't know if you have any Radio Shack stores in your area, but the RS stores here do carry a lot of values of these types of capacitors. In any even, if you do occasionally tinker with broken electronics gear, It's something to watch for. It's not just a problem with computer monitors, but pretty much all electronics that use switching power supplies. It's pretty easy to diagnose. You don't even need any test equipment to find the problem. Just your eyes. Scandinavia ain't that big on Radio Shack, so no Thanks for the tip anyway. If nothing else, I learned something new today and that's certainly worth a lot |
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Post by the light works on May 27, 2014 14:17:36 GMT
the good thing about the capacitor issue is that it had a particular time it was really bad, and then stopped being so bad. - I forget exactly what design flaw caused it, but it was allegedly improved.
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Post by c64 on May 27, 2014 14:46:05 GMT
If it is getting worse with time, it's probably that capacitor problem I mentioned in an earlier post. This is a very common problem in just about everything that uses switching power supplies. It's caused by under rated caps. If you do ever get it apart, here's what to look for. If you're not experienced at soldering, you may be able to find someone to help you. $2 for new capacitors is a lot better than $100 for a new monitor.  WORSE |
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Post by GTCGreg on May 27, 2014 15:10:13 GMT
the good thing about the capacitor issue is that it had a particular time it was really bad, and then stopped being so bad. - I forget exactly what design flaw caused it, but it was allegedly improved. The problem was caused by very large ripple current through very small capacitors. The switching power supplies operate at very high frequencies. This meant that the designers could use much smaller capacitors for filtering. The problem was that while electrically the capacitors are the correct value to do the filtering, physically they are too small to dissipate the heat. The problem with replacing defective ones is that there is often not enough room to fit the proper capacitor. And yes, you see the problem less often now because they are now using larger capacitors. Too bad it took them 10 years to figure this out. |
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Post by the light works on May 27, 2014 15:18:37 GMT
the good thing about the capacitor issue is that it had a particular time it was really bad, and then stopped being so bad. - I forget exactly what design flaw caused it, but it was allegedly improved. The problem was caused by very large ripple current through very small capacitors. The switching power supplies operate at very high frequencies. This meant that the designers could use much smaller capacitors for filtering. The problem was that while electrically the capacitors are the correct value to do the filtering, physically they are too small to dissipate the heat. The problem with replacing defective ones is that there is often not enough room to fit the proper capacitor. And yes, you see the problem less often now because they are now using larger capacitors. Too bad it took them 10 years to figure this out. I ran into that on an emergency repair at a wastewater plant several years back. a valve had failed to cycle properly and when they tried to close and reopen it to clear any possible clog, the capacitor blew out. we found a motor repair shop that could get us the replacement capactor, and he was a bit confused - because he said it was a start capacitor, and if you tried to run a motor with it, it would overheat in less than a minute... when I reinstalled it and tested it, the valve cycle was about 30 seconds. not enough to overheat the capacitor unless, say, they had a problem and cycled it three times in a row... |
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Post by kharnynb on May 27, 2014 15:42:43 GMT
That's called "engineered for perfect weather" in the aircraft trade....
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Post by the light works on May 27, 2014 15:55:58 GMT
That's called "engineered for perfect weather" in the aircraft trade.... well, normal operation would cycle it twice in about an hour - with a 10-15 minute interval in between. |
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Post by GTCGreg on May 27, 2014 15:58:08 GMT
I ran into that on an emergency repair at a wastewater plant several years back. a valve had failed to cycle properly and when they tried to close and reopen it to clear any possible clog, the capacitor blew out. we found a motor repair shop that could get us the replacement capactor, and he was a bit confused - because he said it was a start capacitor, and if you tried to run a motor with it, it would overheat in less than a minute... when I reinstalled it and tested it, the valve cycle was about 30 seconds. not enough to overheat the capacitor unless, say, they had a problem and cycled it three times in a row... Had the same problem with the run cap in my garage door opener. Open and close the door two or three times in a row and it's fine but I was trying to adjust the open-close limits and ran the door up and down about 10 times in a short period of time. The motor run cap let lose with a loud bang and let all the smoke out. Definitely not designed for continuous duty. |
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Post by the light works on May 27, 2014 16:06:40 GMT
I ran into that on an emergency repair at a wastewater plant several years back. a valve had failed to cycle properly and when they tried to close and reopen it to clear any possible clog, the capacitor blew out. we found a motor repair shop that could get us the replacement capactor, and he was a bit confused - because he said it was a start capacitor, and if you tried to run a motor with it, it would overheat in less than a minute... when I reinstalled it and tested it, the valve cycle was about 30 seconds. not enough to overheat the capacitor unless, say, they had a problem and cycled it three times in a row... Had the same problem with the run cap in my garage door opener. Open and close the door two or three times in a row and it's fine but I was trying to adjust the open-close limits and ran the door up and down about 10 times in a short period of time. The motor run cap let lose with a loud bang and let all the smoke out. Definitely not designed for continuous duty. duty cycle rating: its a thing. other critical question: is this a CRT monitor or a flat screen monitor? - check that - I looked back and it is LCD. I was wondering about the possibility of a fault in the display, itself, rather than a control fault. don't know if LCD is susceptible to that, but it was a warning on one of our old CRT monitors before the display spontaneously self adjusted to nX1 resolution. |
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Post by silverdragon on May 28, 2014 5:57:24 GMT
Sadly Denmark is a bit too far to throw a cable over I've managed to collect about a dozen of vga cables and about 10 dvi ones.... Amateur....?.... I can see about a dozen of each from here, there is a box on the top shelf with more, and some spare IDE cables, Power connectors, an old PSU, spare SATA cables, even PATA cables, and I dont-want-to-count how many spare USB bits.... |
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Post by kharnynb on May 28, 2014 7:02:04 GMT
hehe, Moving countries tends to cut down on your "spares" collection ;D
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Post by OziRiS on Jul 7, 2014 7:27:52 GMT
Okay tech gurus, problem has evolved. Up for a challenge?
So, I've googled intensely to try to figure out what was up with this auto adjust thing and found out it's a common problem with the type of screen I'm using (Viseo 190w). The fix, apparently, was to set the resolution to 1280x1024, but when I went to change it, that option wasn't there. "AHA!" methinks and goes to the AMD website to update my graphics drivers. I find this program called "AMD Catalyst", which has the driver I need along with some other stuff that AMD seem to think is important.
So I download and install and during the process I get a BSOD, the system restarts and when I get back into windwoes, the resolution is only 800x600. Right-click the screen, click "screen resolution" and the option for 1280x1024 is there, so I pick that. No more auto adjusting, so all is well. Or not...
I think the AMD Catalyst program is telling my GPU to just go flat out all the time, because now I've got a fan that constantly screams at the top of its lungs. Tried running Open Hardware Monitor, which is my go-to program for system monitoring, to figure out which fan is going at top speed. All fans are going at normal speed. At least the ones it lists. All of a sudden, there's no entry for the GPU fan anymore, so I'm guessing the AMD program has done something wonky with the entire way the system gets feedback from the card.
Luckily I've got enough common sense to know to create a restore point before installing something like this, so I'll be running system restore in a minute to make sure my GPU fan doesn't come flying out the side of my tower at some point, but this also means that I'm back to square one.
And BTW, while changing the resolution to 1280x1024 does indeed fix the auto adjust problem, it seems weird to me that it would be the go-to resolution for this screen. It's a 16:9 LCD screen, so the image looks flat and fuzzy compared to 1366x768, which is what it's normally set to.
Any ideas?
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Post by c64 on Jul 7, 2014 10:39:55 GMT
Okay tech gurus, problem has evolved. Up for a challenge? So, I've googled intensely to try to figure out what was up with this auto adjust thing and found out it's a common problem with the type of screen I'm using (Viseo 190w). The fix, apparently, was to set the resolution to 1280x1024, but when I went to change it, that option wasn't there. "AHA!" methinks and goes to the AMD website to update my graphics drivers. I find this program called "AMD Catalyst", which has the driver I need along with some other stuff that AMD seem to think is important. So I download and install and during the process I get a BSOD, the system restarts and when I get back into windwoes, the resolution is only 800x600. Right-click the screen, click "screen resolution" and the option for 1280x1024 is there, so I pick that. No more auto adjusting, so all is well. Or not... I think the AMD Catalyst program is telling my GPU to just go flat out all the time, because now I've got a fan that constantly screams at the top of its lungs. Tried running Open Hardware Monitor, which is my go-to program for system monitoring, to figure out which fan is going at top speed. All fans are going at normal speed. At least the ones it lists. All of a sudden, there's no entry for the GPU fan anymore, so I'm guessing the AMD program has done something wonky with the entire way the system gets feedback from the card. Luckily I've got enough common sense to know to create a restore point before installing something like this, so I'll be running system restore in a minute to make sure my GPU fan doesn't come flying out the side of my tower at some point, but this also means that I'm back to square one. And BTW, while changing the resolution to 1280x1024 does indeed fix the auto adjust problem, it seems weird to me that it would be the go-to resolution for this screen. It's a 16:9 LCD screen, so the image looks flat and fuzzy compared to 1366x768, which is what it's normally set to. Any ideas? Of course the image looks squeezed and blurred. You have less pixels defined than the screen has in horizontal and more pixels vertically than physically present. So horizontal, your virtual pixels are sitting between the too large pixel grid so each virtual pixel from your PC is mixed with neighbors to two physical pixels and vertically, every n-th line is mixed with its neighbors to squeeze them into the too small grid. That's what some of us techies call an "eye cancer maker". This is no solution you should even consider. 1024x768 would be the only alternative and using black borders to convert your 16:9 screen into a 4:3 one. This is the only way to match the pixels correctly. The built in firmware of a modern graphic card is minimalistic, it handles just the basics. The real firmware is part of your "driver" and uploaded into the card from the PC so it can always be up to date. Without the complete firmware, the card has no power management (e.g. fans at full speed) and also lacks other features so it might be a lot slower than it should be. Do you still have warranty? The only solution I could think of is that the monitor is using the analogue VGA signals. With the digital DVI-D link (or HDMI), the auto-adjust feature is pointless. So you might want to try to conect it to a HDMI output of your graphic card or try a DVI->HDMI adapter and if the monitor has no HDMI input, use a second adapter as HDMI->DVI to get rid of the analogue VGA signals and make sure the monitor runs on a digital link. |
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Post by kharnynb on Jul 7, 2014 10:54:06 GMT
try reinstalling catalyst drivers first.
If you have an analog cable and a analog connection on the monitor, try that, using a dvi-analog convertor on the graphics card(this is an issue i've had with a bad combo nvidia/lg monitor).
try to keep the monitor in native resolution though, it always will be blurry otherwise.
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Post by OziRiS on Jul 7, 2014 12:12:14 GMT
try reinstalling catalyst drivers first. If you have an analog cable and a analog connection on the monitor, try that, using a dvi-analog convertor on the graphics card(this is an issue i've had with a bad combo nvidia/lg monitor). try to keep the monitor in native resolution though, it always will be blurry otherwise. My further Google searches have come up with allegations that there have been problems with the catalyst drivers since around version 9.x and that the only way to get a proper installation is to wipe all existing drivers before installing, making a clean installation. However, details are varied and sketchy as to the best way to make sure all the old drivers are gone. They go everywhere from manually removing them through the device manager to various programs (the folks over at AlienWare are suggesting running DriverSweeper in safe mode, rebooting and running CCleaner, but since their post, DriverSweeper has been bought out by a different company and I'm not sure I should trust the new one). Thoughts? |
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Post by kharnynb on Jul 7, 2014 12:32:30 GMT
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