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Display suddenly went narrow

#1 User is offline   dominose 

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Posted 22 August 2009 - 08:11 AM

8-21-2009 06:13 PM

I have a Toshiba laptop. Several times now, when Windows doesn't "shut down normally", it comes back with the entire display is narrowed and squashed into about half the screen and there's also part of the display shown a second time as a small slice to the right.
I'm using Windows Vista.
I've fixed it several times with a trick. I right-click on the screen, choose "Personalize", I change the font size. It restarts the PC, and sometimes it comes back with the display filling the whole screen.
Right now the display is squashed to the left again, and doing the trick over and over doesn't work.
What might be wrong? I have the recovery and applications disk, is there anything I could reinstall from that?
thanks
Laura

#2 User is offline   dominose 

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Posted 22 August 2009 - 09:04 AM

I fixed it, hopefully permanently this time :thumbsup:, by reinstalling the video driver from the "recovery and applications" CD. Apparently my video driver software got corrupted by a bad DVD I was playing on it.
It was surprising how unsympathetic and unbelieving the people at Hollywood Video were when I said the rental DVD had done weird things to my computer. But apparently a DVD can modify your driver software.
Laura

#3 User is offline   dominose 

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Posted 01 October 2009 - 04:40 PM

I just got my laptop back, fixed (I hope!).

It was a bad display cable, just so you know.

The guy at the repair shop first replaced the screen. But that didn't fix it. He'd tried another display on the pc and the problem didn't happen, that's why he thought it was the screen. But I guess when he tried the other display, with a cable that worked, so that was why it fixed it.

He said he knew right away it wasn't a software problem because my pc booted with the screen narrow.

He kept on saying it was a "very odd" problem. Especially that I kept on fixing the problem temporarily by changing the font size, reinstalling the video driver software, etc.

But I hope it's fixed permanently now. It sounds like it.

Laura

#4 User is offline   garmanma 

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Posted 02 October 2009 - 10:50 AM

Thank you for posting back with your solution
Glad to hear that it's fixed
Mark
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