Issues with my monitor display

[AndyF1069]

Hello, this morning I encountered a problem with what my monitor is displaying. I ordinarily run 1440x900 screen resolution and have done so for 2 years with no trouble at all. I opened up hearthstone and the game was stuck at the loading screen, but my pc was responding normally. I could move my mouse, I had no delay from turning on caps lock and num lock. I was unable to alt tab out and alt f4 wasn't producing results, so I used the power off button to restart my pc.

Upon restarting, I now have two black bars on either side of my screen, the left side being larger than the right side. My mouse stops at the black bar and does not pass through them. After messing around with changing the display settings to see if that helped or not, my desktop display picture became greyed out. I also can not see my start menu task bar without dragging it up after unlocking it.

My monitor comes with an auto adjustment feature which ordinarily does the trick whenever I encounter problems (very infrequently I should add), but now it is accepting what I have as normal.

I have done a system restore, scanned for viruses or disc errors and restarted the natural way multiple times. I have tried opening games which auto adjust the display but they also continue to show the black bars. Every display setting I have tried (including the tiny 800x600) shows black bars.

I don't know if any of this is relevant or not, my driver card is the asus 4350, my operating system is windows xp home and my monitors brand is Emprex (although I couldn't possibly tell you the model type).


Appreciate any help and suggestions that are given to me.

[Twoddle]

Are you still running at 1440x900 and is that you monitor's native resolution? If so it sounds like the aspect ratio is messed up either in the monitor settings (via the monitor buttons) or in the display driver settings (via the control panel).

[darkblitzrc]

yeah change the aspect ratio dude it might work

[AndyF1069]

Thanks for the replies. I'm not entirely sure how to change aspect ratio or what I'm actually running at.

My native display is 1280x720 and running in this resolution has no display issues at all. Switching up to anything higher produces an image that is too big or too small for my monitor when previously (as mentioned) I'd run for years without issue.

It might also be worth mentioning that the monitor itself is about 6-7 years old. Whenever I turn on my computer, the monitor itself has no display and the light that is ordinarily green when turned on is red. It takes about 30 seconds for the display to appear normally. Is the problem perhaps my monitor itself and not my computer settings? My own belief is that it is computer settings based on the situation in my original post that triggered all of this.

[Cyrops]

When you set to anything else but your native resolution, your picture might be "not inside the monitor" or "you get black bars on the sides". Auto adjust should work, if it doesn't then the monitor auto adjust might be broken.
You should try to manually adjust picture width/hight etc. Every monitor has that. You seem to have fiddled with wrong settings if you got the picture greyed out :P
It would help if you listed your monitor. Have you tried looking for a sticker on the back of the monitor?