PC ProSchools – TechTalk

A few weeks ago, I went to visit my brother. He told me that his new flat screen monitor wasn’t working with his computer. When he plugged it in and turned the computer on, it started up fine, displayed the Windows XP welcome screen and then went black.

His old monitor worked perfectly fine with the computer. I asked him if he turned it off before switching out the monitors.

He said that he did.

He tried a couple of different things that didn’t work. He wanted to know if I could take a look at it, since I was here. First, I wanted to see what happened myself.

We switched out the monitors and it started up and then went black. At first, I thought it was a driver problem. I downloaded and installed the driver for the monitor. When I switched to the new monitor, it went black again. So I went to his other machine and Googled the problem. I found an entry on Tom’s Hardware that talked about the screen refresh rate, sometimes it is set too low for a new monitor to handle.

I switched to the old monitor on the problem computer to find out what the current screen refresh rate was. His rate was within the range suggested by the website. I lowered the rate because I believed that it may have been too high for the monitor. I switched out the monitors again.

This time, it worked. I was now able to use the computer.

Then I told my brother how I solved his problem, He couldn’t believe it and had to see his computer working.

Now he has more space on his computer desk.

Editor’s Note: DJ’s story shows that even a software engineer knows how to troubleshoot a hardware problem.