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.