I recently hooked up a secondary monitor to my ati 9800 XT, and its crap!

It's a Goldstar Stuidoworks 76i monitor. I have a dvi-vga adaptor and a regular vga-m/m cable. the problem isnt with the dvi cause if i plug my good monitor into the dvi adaptor, it works well and the 76i is still blurry.

the problem is if i change the resolution to anything greater than 800x600, the picture gets very fuzzy, and unusable. i've tried lots of different freq. combinations, and tried changing the colour as well. i looked all over for drivers for the monitor but i didnt find any for XP, i found something that was basically colour profiles, i loaded them, but they didnt change anything.

am i forgetting something? or is the monitor just CRAPOLA?

thank you so much for your help!!

- satan.

Well since you checked to DVI adapter with another monitor I say your monitor is going bad. How old is it? There might be a label with the year on it the back. I have seen this happen to monitors only old 3 years old but usually it monitors older than that.

Other signs indicating its near death is a high pitch whine at higher resolutions or max brightness and contrast.

Tell us what you find.

Good Hunting
-chris

there's no whine, but this monitor is OLD. it was a bargain (free) it handles contrast and brightness fine. do you think i should try and pawn it off? it works, just not well. hehe.

is it possible my graphics card isnt putting out as much as it should be to the monitor though? i thought i saw somthing once that suggested the 2nd display of my card only got 1mb of video memory.

thanks for any help

- fueled by satan


edit: also, i havnt been able to truly "install" the monitor. it is still "default monitor" maybe this is part of it. i cant find the installer anywhere. what do i do.

Well i dont think your card for the 2nd monitor is using lower memory. It should be at full power. Even if your video card had only 1meg or ram it would not cause fuzzy text. It would be slow at refreshing or uses few colors. Fuzzy text is a sign of the monitor going out of aligenment.

It being a "Default monitor" driver is fine. That mostly deals with color profiles for graphic designers and power saving features. Not really important. So that is not it.

The only other thing that could cause stuff like this is the refresh rate being set too high and you mentioned you play with different settings to no avail. HAve your tried 60Hz?

I say its dieing from what you said so far. Since you said its old be happy that the monitor served you well for so long. Plus it was free. You cant beat that! =)

Good Hunting for frugal deal on a new monitor.

chris