Monitor Problem

[Ultrapoet]

A friend of mine just brought his computer from home to his dorm room, and his monitor is driving him nuts. Here's the dish:

The system is a Dell - I think a 4350 (could be wrong, but I know it was purchased a little over a year ago) - and it's a Dell monitor. The display is dim and the brightness settings are already maxed. I can't find any settings in the control panel that would cause the display to be so dim, and I've tried changing several settings (256 to High-color, etc.) anyway just to see if it made a difference. Nada.

He said neither the monitor nor the CPU were dropped in the move or physically damaged in any way that he knew of. But he thinks his little sister may have gotten into something in the control panel and changed settings.

He even wanted to try reinstalling everything from the OEM disk - which we did - to eliminate the possibility of virii and messed-up settings. Nothing has helped.

The only thing I haven't tried for him is reseating the video card. But after the reinstall the system picked up the monitor fine as P-n-P and selected the same driver that it had before, so I don't really think the video card is seated improperly - it seems to be connecting fine.

The only things I can think of now are that either the monitor itself is suffering some kind of internal defect, or that the video card is physically damaged from something.

I just wanted to see if anyone had further suggestions or tips before I advised this guy to go buy a new monitor or video card.

Thanks

Ultra

[Paleo Pete]

Borrow a monitor and try it on the same machine, and try that monitor on another machine. That will tell you whether it's the monitor or something in the settings. If the problem monitor does the same thing on another machine, or a different monitor works correctly on that machine, it's probably a dying monitor.

If the problem monitor works correctly on another machine, it has to be a problem with the computer, settings, or possibly even BIOS, but I doubt it's BIOS...

And try wiggling the cable where the monitor plugs into the video card, could just be a bad connection.

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