On 2010-02-14 6:50, Brian Walters wrote:
The first problem was that the OS booted up and set my 19 in wide screen monitor at 1280 x 800 resolution. "No problem", I thought. "Go to Display Properties and nudge it up to the native 1440 x 900". Bad idea. The screen went black and stayed like that. Hmmmm. Reboot - no display, so I couldn't even reset it back to the lower res. Swapped the widescreen for my wife's 19 in standard screen. Well, at least that worked. Reconnect the widescreen and the black screen returned.
When you get the black screen problem like that, reboot the machine and watch closely. Just after the BIOS messages leave the screen, press the F8 key a few times. That should get you a boot selection menu screen. One of the menu items will be "start Windows in Safe Mode with VGA". Choose that item and it should drop back to no better than 800 lines of resolution, which nearly any monitor can handle. That'll give you a chance to reset the video mode, update video drivers, etc.
Packed up the computer plus the wide screen monitor and headed off to the computer shop. Collective scratching of heads until a light bulb went off over Dave's (Dave being the computer shop manager). "Let's try a DVI cable", he said. It worked. High five's all 'round.
I have a similar issue with my HD TV connected to my laptop ... using a VGA cable it will only go to 1300x768 or so. Apparently I have to find a way to connect it via HDMI to go higher, but the laptop's old enough that's apparently not an option.
Finally, in desperation, pluged one of the drives into a 4-port USB hub and.... suddenly Windows 7 could see it. Same with the other drive.
That's really strange. I haven't (yet) had that with any external storage device on Win7, flash drive or hard drive.
A bit more investigation revealed that not only would the two Western Digital drives not work when plugged directly ito the USB ports on the system board, the same applied for any mass storage device. So I was unable to read any of my thumb drives unless I plugged them into the 4-port hub. However, the system USB ports work fine for my mouse and printer.
That sounds like an issue with the USB chipset on the motherboard. You might need a BIOS update for the motherboard, or it might simply be a design issue, like with the amount of power load those USB ports can take, as you guess. However, I'd guess the built-in USB ports might not be able to supply enough current. A powered hub can supply up to 0.25A per USB port, IIRC, while a non-powered hub can support only up to 0.1A per port. It's possible the ones on your motherboard are wired without the 0.25A power support, or the BIOS puts them into a mode that can only support the 0.1A pass through.
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