XP Forgets Display Settings After Restart

[xr280xr]

Hi,
I have dual displays at my computer and it has recently started "forgetting"
the display settings after I restart. Upon restarting once, only one monitor
will come up with a signal and I can't get it to output to the other monitor.
If I restart a second time, both monitors will have a signal but it has the
wrong montior set up as the primary monitor. What is supposed to be my second
monitor (the one w/ my desktop extended onto it) has my desktop icons and an
extra toolbar that I use. It's also oriented on the wrong side of what is
supposed to be my primary monitor. What's supposed to be the primary monitor,
still has the taskbar on it for some reason.

It's pretty annoying to have to reset all this every time I restart. Is
there some registry value I can set or clear to fix this?

 

[DL]

And what are you using to provide multi monitor support, the software
supplied with your graphics card or win multi monitor?
Have you installed any driver updates from MSUpdate?

 

[xr280xr]

Thanks for your response. This never notifies me of replies and I can never
find my posts...

For multi monitor configuration I normally right click the
desktop>properties>settings. I have an nvidia quadro fx 570 card and the
nvidia control panel can set it up too.

I thought I had the problem resolved when I found that the Windows interface
somehow had conflicting settings with the nvidia control panel settings. But
I just installed a second video card and 3rd monitor and it all went to hell.
I currently have the 2nd video card disabled and the 3rd monitor unplugged
for simplifying troubleshooting. So I'm trying to get an Asus monitor, and a
dell monitor to display with the Asus as my primary monitor and the windows
desktop extended onto the Dell. Here are the latest symptoms:

-Dell monitor was originally plugged in and set as single primary monitor.
-Plugged in Asus monitor. No signal.
-Told windows to extend the desktop onto the Asus. It acts like it did, but
no signal.
-Told windows to make the Asus the primary and extend the desktop onto the
dell. No signal on the Asus and no desktop icons or start menu on the dell.
-Restarted, same problems after restart.
-Restarted with only the Asus plugged in. It displayed correctly and I
changed the resolution to the appropriate resolution.
-Plugged in the dell monitor and restarted.
-Dell monitor initialized first so I quickly restarted again before windows
loaded.
-Asus monitor initialized first, I saw the POST screen and the Windows
loading screen but the login screen then appeared on the Dell and Asus had no
signal! Furthermore the dell had the Asus' resolution.

For some reason it always wants to use the dell monitor and won't send
signal to the Asus. It also seems like it's getting the two mixed up. Is the
nvidia driver conflicting with windows or something? I have uninstalled the
nvidia driver all together and am re-installing now.

 

[xr280xr]

Oh, and I don't believe I've ever updated the display drivers from MS but I'm
not 100% positive.

 

[xr280xr]

After re-installing here is some more behavior that might narrow it down. I'm
pretty sure something is different about this Dell monitor. It acts like it's
not plug and play or not multi-display friendly or something.

I've been using my computer with only the Asus mointor pluged in to the
nvidia quadro card and it has worked fine. Quadro card has two DVI out puts.
I notice if I unplug the Asus monitor and plug it back in, I hear the XP plug
and play device found sound. I tried switching between the two DVI plugs and
it works fine on both.

Next I tried plugging in the Dell again. It doesn't play the plug and play
sound effect for this monitor and doesn't send it any signal. If I go to my
display settings, it only recognizes 1 monitor: (Default Monitor) on NVIDIA
Quadro FX 570. When checking the display settings in the nvidia control
panel, it shows a single monitor and actually shows the name: Asus VH236H.

Here's the stranger part. If I go to Device Manager>Monitors>Scan for
hardware changes, then the sound plays and Dell E1909W(Digital) shows up in
the list of monitors. When I return to the windows display settings tab, it
still only recognizes the 1 monitor. Strangely, when checking the nvidia
control panel settings, it now shows only Dell E1909W and no longer sees the
Asus monitor. What seems like the biggest clue in all of this is, if at this
point I unplug the Dell monitor, the plug and play noise plays as if it just
found the Asus monitor again even though it was already plugged in. Once I
crawl back out from under my desk (which is getting really fun Asus VH236H
now appears in the still open nvidia control panel settings screen.

So it's like the Dell monitor is not plug and play, and once it's
recognized, it wants to be the only display. I need an expert! Thanks.

 

[Paul]

After re-installing here is some more behavior that might narrow it down. I'm
pretty sure something is different about this Dell monitor. It acts like it's
not plug and play or not multi-display friendly or something.

I've been using my computer with only the Asus mointor pluged in to the
nvidia quadro card and it has worked fine. Quadro card has two DVI out puts.
I notice if I unplug the Asus monitor and plug it back in, I hear the XP plug
and play device found sound. I tried switching between the two DVI plugs and
it works fine on both.

Next I tried plugging in the Dell again. It doesn't play the plug and play
sound effect for this monitor and doesn't send it any signal. If I go to my
display settings, it only recognizes 1 monitor: (Default Monitor) on NVIDIA
Quadro FX 570. When checking the display settings in the nvidia control
panel, it shows a single monitor and actually shows the name: Asus VH236H.

Here's the stranger part. If I go to Device Manager>Monitors>Scan for
hardware changes, then the sound plays and Dell E1909W(Digital) shows up in
the list of monitors. When I return to the windows display settings tab, it
still only recognizes the 1 monitor. Strangely, when checking the nvidia
control panel settings, it now shows only Dell E1909W and no longer sees the
Asus monitor. What seems like the biggest clue in all of this is, if at this
point I unplug the Dell monitor, the plug and play noise plays as if it just
found the Asus monitor again even though it was already plugged in. Once I
crawl back out from under my desk (which is getting really fun Asus VH236H
now appears in the still open nvidia control panel settings screen.

So it's like the Dell monitor is not plug and play, and once it's
recognized, it wants to be the only display. I need an expert! Thanks.

You can review the Plug and Play coming from the monitors with this.
If you can see the two monitors in the pull-down menu, and both
displays gobs of numbers, then chances are both monitors are doing
their jobs. If one display shows and the other does not, there could
be some kind of conflict (or bad implementation) on the video card.

http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/moninfo.shtm

Page 8 here, shows a hardware block diagram. You have to be very patient,
as when you use Adobe Acrobat Reader to view page 8, it can take many
seconds before the diagram appears (on my slow computers, I have to wait
30 seconds before the diagram appears). So flip to page 8 and wait until
a yellow colored block diagram appears in the middle of the page.

http://ati.amd.com/products/radeonx1k/whitepapers/X1000_Family_Technology_Overview_Whitepaper.pdf

The concept there, is there are logically two display channels on the
video card. A display channel is "bound" to a monitor at some point.
A video card may have three connectors on the faceplate, but only
two of them can be driven at any one time, as there are only
two logical display channels in a multi-head capable desktop video card.
(Cards capable of driving four monitors, are cheating, as they use
two GPU chips, and really, it is the same ratio of two display channels
available per GPU chip.)

Now, consider your scenario. You have two monitors. Only one of them
seems to "bind" to anything, and the monitor that wins seems to be
random.

Imagine, for some reason, that only one logical display channel was working.
This could be a driver issue (such as the driver not installing properly),
or some other kind of interference, such as running in SLI mode.
Would the second card also be an FX 570 ? Did the Nvidia driver
assume they're operating SLI, and do some kind of bus-based
SLI combining of the two cards performance ? Perhaps that
results in one logical display channel, and only the ability
to drive one monitor. (Two cards in SLI, as far as I know,
are still limited to driving one display. Maybe that has changed
recently, but I don't have an easy way to check that.)

Now, on my computer, I've got it easy. In Device Manager, each
display channel of my video card, has its own entry. In other
words, I have one video card installed, but there are two
entries in Device Manager. I can tell by looking at that, that
logically all is well.

It seems for more recent video cards (mine is ancient), that
has changed. They no longer necessarily put multiple entries
in Device Manager. I was hoping to use that as a debugging tool,
but looking at pictures of Device Manager on the web, they
don't seem to use that concept any more. Now, they seem to
put only one entry per video card. That leaves me with
no simple way to verify both logical display channels are available.

Paul

 

[xr280xr]

Wow, that's some excellent information Paul, thank you. I will try out the
Monitor Asset Manager after I restart. I currently have all 3 displays
working but I'm guessing it might get messed up again after I restart. There
does seem to be a binding issue but to me it seems like the Dell always wins
when it's plugged in. Based on that, I figured, I should just plug the Dell
into the second video card and stop trying to battle between it and another
monitor (Fuji Plus a.k.a. Kingston). So with the Asus and a 3rd monitor
plugged into the FX 570 and the Dell plugged into the disabled second card,
which is a PCI GForce 6200, I started to try to get dual monitors to work. I
could not get it to work using windows but using the nvidia control panel, I
could choose from Clone, or Span across the monitors. "Dual View" was not
available. I've seen this before in the past too and usually restarting it
magically causes Dual View to become available and it did this time too. I
now had dual displays working correctly. I restarted again to make sure it
would stick and the secondary monitor initialized first during startup, but
then they displayed correctly once Windows (and probably the nvidia driver)
was loaded. I enabled the GForce 6200, restarted and configured the Dell as
my 3rd display and so far so good. So it seems like with the Asus + Kingston,
the FX 570 is finnicky but predictable but with the Asus + Dell, it's
completely uncontrollable.

In reference to the rest of your post, it does seem like one of the channels
gets deactivated somehow and I have to perform the right steps, such as
restarting after it recognizes 2 monitors are being used, to get it to use
it. I was not aware of SLI technology until you mentioned it but that does
sound like a good theory though I'm guessing since my second card is just a
PCI card, it might not even be possible. I don't even have the SLI settings
under 3D settings in the NVidia control panel so hopefully that is not
happening! FYI, according to the nvidia control panel help, you can actually
set up SLI with multiple monitors too now.

My device manager used to show the fx570 as two devices too but now it just
shows one. I don't know when or why that changed. It sounds like I probably
need to get in contact with nvidia or Dell support for this as it's most
likely an issue with the way the video card is being driven?

Thanks for your help.

 

[xr280xr]

Well it's been a couple weeks and I've restarted a couple times and the
monitors have come up correctly both times now that I have the Dell monitor
plugged into the 2nd video card by itself. So I think that it is something
about that was messing up the way my other video card initialized. I wish I
knew what it was. One strange quirck I still have is when restarting, the
POST screen and Windows XP loading screen always initialize on my secondary
monitor no matter which physical output I use on the back. Once windows is
loaded they get sorted out though so not a problem.