VGAsafe mode

[Stephan]

Hi,

Can someone tell me how I can fix my display when in safe
mode. It is almost impossible to see what is showing on
screen in Safe mode, while in normal XP the screen is
fine.

Basically, when I want to investigate issues in safe
mode, I don't see much what I am doing...

I have XP - home edition on a Satellite Pro4600 laptop.
All my drivers are up-to-date and compatible to XP.
Video driver = Trident video accelerator cyberblade-xp

Thanks.

 

[Stephan]

Can anybody help?

 

[Guest]

I would expect you have probabbly given up with this post seeing as it was made so long ago but I thought I'd post a few suggestions anyway

Laptops use LCD screens and they work differently to CRT with repect to different screen modes. Safe mode uses a much lower resolution than you would be used to in normal windows mode. It is probabbly around 640x480 or maybe 800x600

It is this that could be casuing the problems. Different screens handle different resoloutions differently. It may stretch the screen to fill the entire LCD area in which case the display would look very blurry, although I would imagine that you would still be able to navigate.

Sometimes an LCD screen would not stretch the display so windows would appear in the middle of the LCD screen with large black boarders around it

Also there are some screen modes that (some?)LCD screens cannot handle at all. My manual states a few, 640x400 for example

You can normally change this option in the bios. My first suggestion is therefore to try changing this option and see if that makes it easier to see what is going on. This is normally achieved by pressing a key like del or F2 at system startup

Another suggestion would be to connect the laptop up to a normal CRT screen and switch the dispaly to external/CRT using the keyboard shortcu

If this does not help you could always try looking on the web to see if there is a way of changing the resolution safe mode uses, although i'm not entirely sure if this is possible

I have never had the same problem on my dell laptop, and if toshiba are unable to help you it could be a hardware fault .