External displays stopped working

I have a Dell Inspiron 1520 with an Nvidia 8600gt. I have a dell 2409 24 inch 1920 x 1080 monitor and a Samsung 22inch 1680x1050 LCD TV. I use one or the other depending what room I'm in. Both are connected using VGA cables.

These have always worked perfectly, today when I tried plugging into either one they are detected as 'generic non pnp monitor' and I get a choice of standard resolutions up to 1600 x 1200. These always used to run at their native resolutions and were detected as Samsung and Dell.

I have reinstalled the display drivers, power cycled everything, gpu seems to be running fine according to gpu-z.

I have reverted to a working backup but that made no difference. Im using windows 7 64bit.

Any ideas??

hakka.

 

have you upgraded the display drivers lately?

 

I tried the latest display driver today, it made no difference.

It has always worked fine on the older display driver I was using, until a few days ago.

Hakka.

 

I've had some issues like that with my 42'' lcd tv at home. I would connect my laptop to the tv and it would automatically recognize the output, refresh rate etc. Sometimes though it acts as if it doesn't recognize it at all, and I have to play with the resolutions to get it back to normal. I never lost the resolutions though.

Are you configuring through win 7 screen resolution or through nvidia's menus

 

I've tried both the win 7 resolution screen and nvidia control panel. Both are the same, they only show standard resolutions up to 1600 x 1200. I tried the custom resolution on the Nvidia control panel but it gave a 'test failed' message.

2 different monitors are affected so I'm guessing its not the monitors. I reverted to a known working backup but that made no difference, I'm thinking some type of hardware failure is the cause. The 8600gt is known to have failure issues but if that was the case there should be more symptoms.

VGA port maybe??


Hakka.

 

Well you're right with the 8600m gt having issues, a lot of laptop owners have had to have them replaced, but if this is the only issue I would say its not an outright indication of gpu failure.

When you did a reinstall of the old drivers did you run safe mode and use ccleaner to make sure all of the old drivers were uninstalled?

 

???...The issue is to do with gpu/external displays not external hard drive

 

Yes, did all that.

Hakka.

 

What about changing the resolutions on you laptop screen, does it stop at 1600 x 1200?

Also does your laptop have another external display port to connect, hdmi or svideo?

 

The laptop screen goes up to 1280x800, which is the native res of the screen, it seems to be working the same as it always has.

I dont have hdmi but I do have s-video. I think my Samsung LCD supports s-video I'll give that a try.

Hakka.

 

Tried the s-video connection, the TV is still detcted as generic non-pnp monitor, resolution is limited to 1024x768.

Looks like that rules out the VGA port.

Hakka.

 

So I guess that leaves either a faulty gpu or software/driver issue.

Have you tried booting the laptop connected to either of the displays?

 

I've tried booting with the displays connected, no luck.

I've now reverted to 3 system images that are known to work with the external monitors, so I've pretty much ruled out software/driver issues.

Might be time to start looking for a new laptop.

Hakka.

 

Stupid question:
Have you also tried another VGA cable?

Michael

 

Yes each monitor uses a different cable.

hakka.