Acer 4310 dead monitor, can't activate external

Hi guys,

Some months ago the monitor on my Aspire 4310 died. Rather than getting it fixed, yesterday I went out and bought a Samsung 2033sw LCD so that the kids could use it as a desktop PC. I removed the built in monitor and connected the Samsung via the VGA port.

Initially the monitor worked fine (aside from not being able to get the native res 1600x900). Last night I set the notebook to download some windows updates and went to bed. This morning when I got up the monitor was in sleep mode. Unfortunately no amount of button/mouse pressing would wake it up, so I rebooted. The first part of the boot process is displayed nicely on the screen. After the green progress bar disappears the screen goes blank and soon after goes to sleep.

The boot process continues normally after this, it makes all the right sounds and HDD activity is consistent with a normal boot process. I can log in blindly and this seems to be successful also. All of this with the monitor in sleep mode.

Pressing Fn F5 to change monitors doesn't seem to do anything at all.

Booting into safe mode works fine and is displayed nicely.

I'm running Vista Home Basic as was preinstalled.

Any thoughts on how I can force the external LCD on?

Thanks in advance
Phil

 

Boot into safe mode go into device magnger and role back display drivers

or uninstall them reboot normal mode shound find them again

Sound like display drivers problay out too high res for your monitor

 

Thanks,

Well I had some sort of success...I could not roll back because that option was greyed out, so I uninstalled then tried to reinstall.

I have 2 versions of the drivers. The latest one from the acer website and also the latest ones from the intel site. The ones from intel are a slightly later version and were the ones in use when the monitor stopped working.

Now when I try to install the acer ones I get part way through the process and I get a pop up saying "An unknown error occured. Setup will exit."

If I try to install the intel ones in safe mode, they install correctly but I get the blank screen when I reboot. If I try to install them in normal mode the screen blanks part way through the process.

Interestingly, I just remembered that one of the updates I downloaded last night from windows update was a driver for the new monitor.

thanks
phil