When I woke up this morning... (G400 troubles)

[Topha]

Sadly, most of my posts here lately where about this or that problem with my G400Max, which I reinstalled a few month's back, after my 8500 died.

All of the problems so far were either resolved with yall's help, or turned out to be no problems at all.

However, to get back to the topic:

When I woke up this morning, my display was reset to 640x480, when I went to the display properties dialog, it said (the one where the resolution and colordepth can be set) my display was: Standard Monitor with ... .

The ... stands for nothing, and it fills the place where before there stood: Sony E400 with Matrox Millenium G400 and so on

I found that strange, so I uninstalled my Matrox drivers, restarted, installed them again, restarted.
Everything was fine, but after updating my firewall I had to restart again, and the Display device was back to Standardmonitor with ...

So I can turn up the resolution to 1280x1024, but the refresh rate is really low, and the page drawing even in Opera and on this site (not to graphically demanding) is slow and blocky.

Should I switch back to older Matrox drivers, or is the problem elsewhere? Or is my card finally dying (been expecting that for so long now, I'm back to the point where it would actually surprise me).

Thanks, Topha

[UtwigMU]

Maybe try updating BIOS on G400 and try it on another system.

XP should have drivers for G400 by default.

[Topha]

Originally posted by UtwigMU
XP should have drivers for G400 by default.

I know, but it doesnt seem to detect the card as g400.

I think I have the latest bios, but I'll go check.

What bothers me most about this, is the fact that I haven't changed anything on the system (hard & software wise) for about 2 weeks, so why would it suddenly do this to me

[dZeus]

if it doesn't work in a different system, try reflashing the BIOS and/or the PINS for it

[Topha]

dont have a different system at the moment.

bios is reflashed, windows still doesnt recognize it

[Goc]

Did you try a fresh install of Windows?

[dwood]

You said you installed the G400 after your 8500 died.

Are you sure the ATI drivers are COMPLETELY gone from your system? Any remnant could cause problems.

I think ATI has a driver uninstall utility. Might be worth a shot.

You may also want to run Matrox's similar driver uninstall utility to try to get your system completely free of all video drivers then (and only then) do a reinstall of the Matrox drivers.

[Topha]

First: Thanks for the replies so far

Second: Had some problems before because of the 8500 drivers, but I did a reinstall of windows to solve those problems about 1 and a half months ago. Since I am going to move from one city to the next in two weeks, i really dont want to reinstall windows again, because I have too much to do on my PC right now to do that.

Luckily all those things dont require 3D, so for the moment I can live with the slow page drawing. If there is a way to solve this (if anyone else had this problem before, so to speak) I would be happy, if not I will have about a month to unistall and reinstall windows while I live at my parents for a month again (wonder how that is gonna be after 3 years).

Lastly: When something like that happens, after no changes to the system, does it mean that my card (which is affected by the problem, or which seems to be the cause) is dying, or does it mean that windows still behaves really weird, and that I should have switched to linux a long time ago?

[UtwigMU]

If you have a spare HDD (you can also borrow or buy 2nd hand small old drive, 6GB is enough), you can try installing Windows on that - just disconnect your current HDD - (bare Windows install with slipstreamed SP2 only takes 30-60 mins) and see whether it's a hardware or a software problem.

[Kruzin]

You flashed the BIOS, but did you run Matrox's recover utility on it?
G200-G400 have a reputation for loosing their BIOS, and needing the recover utility...

[Topha]

Originally posted by Kruzin
You flashed the BIOS, but did you run Matrox's recover utility on it?
G200-G400 have a reputation for loosing their BIOS, and needing the recover utility...

Thanks a lot, that seems to have done it

[xortam]

Originally posted by Kruzin
... G200-G400 have a reputation for loosing their BIOS, and needing the recover utility...

Had it ever been determined what is causing this? I've never lost the BIOS on my Max all these years (running on an ASUS P2B-S).