-The Video Card can cause you some real aggravations to say the least. Problems seem to range from out of control IRQ's and bad drivers. The worst of these is having a card set to overdrive your monitor, if the monitor cant handle it you may have even more problems.
-Some of the most common problems associated with the Video Card are refresh rates, resolutions settings, and color depth settings. Thankfully most of these can be fixed by going into the control panel of Windows or getting a better monitor to support your Video Card vice versa.
-Now how do you tell if your monitor is getting to much to handle from the Video Card? Here are some symptoms:
Image's appear scrambled of distorted
Shrunken or even multiple instances of an Image
High pitched whine from the monitor.. (Obvious)
Blank Screen
-If any of these are caught right off you are in good shape. When a display is left overdriven is when you can look at possible replacement. So, how do you suppose you are to fix this? The control panel is the first place we should look into.
1. With your mouse on the Desktop right click, choose properties.
2. In the Display Properties dialog choose settings
3. Click on drop down list where color palette exist, choose a lower resolution.
4. Click "Apply", you may be asked to restart computer if so restart.
-Hopefully that helped.
-Different monitors can handle different refresh rates at certain resolutions. The recommended refresh rate is at least 85hz for CRT monitors and resolutions range from 1024x768 to 1600x1200. A small monitor isn't going to handle a large resolution like 1600x1200 at 85Hz and if you try to select this the monitor will not display an image. Check your monitor specs to check its capabilities and install the correct monitor drivers, this will not allow the user to select a resolutoion/refresh the monitor cannot handle.
Dark Screen
-Now what about some other problems such as a black empty screen? This can be corrected in a few different ways or at least an attempt.
1. First check cable and insure its tight and secure to the Video Card!
2. Is monitor on? Sounds dumb but you would be surprised.
3. Shut system down and make sure Video Card hasn't lost its seat. This can happen when system has been moved.
4. Try rebooting
Drivers
-Drivers are the most important thing to a graphics card. As new cards and new games come out, there are bound to be slight bugs and tweaks that will be needed to make the display proper. Ati the makes of the Radeon cards bring out a new driver every month, each driver has bug fixes for certain games and application. Nvidia also bring out drivers for the same reason. It is recommended you keep up to date with new drivers.
