Win2k screen problem

[Dubber Dan]

Someone has fiddled with the screen resolution settingd on a win2k pc so that when it now boots up after displaying the Win2k splash screen when it should show the logon prompt the display now shows the monitor message "signal out of range"

I've tried booting into safe mode which goes fine but when I then boot normally the same thing still happens. How do I get the resolution back to normal (800x600)?

Cheers

[slim]

Signal out of range normally means that there is a problem with the graphis card, i.e. the monitor is not recieving any signal from the graphics card.

As the graphics card seems to work, have you tried removing and reinstaling the graphics card drivers ??

[Paul Komski]

You could try Last Known Good using F8 at bootup.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=315614 indicates that lowering the refresh rate or changing things by running dxdiag might sort it out - you should be able to do these from Safe Mode. Just "getting in" to lower the resolution is obviously your problem.

As already intimated you could also remove the video drivers in Safe Mode and reboot or simply try updating the video drivers.

[Dubber Dan]

Fixed it, I booted with the "Enable VGA" option from the boot menu, which allowed me to log on as the user and then reduce the resolution to normal. They had tried pushing it up to 1600x1200!!!

[sleddog]

That's it. The "signal out of range" message can be caused by either (a) setting the resolution higher than the monitor supports (as in your case), or (b) setting the refresh rate higher than the monitor supports. Both problems can be resolved by booting to Safe Mode (VGA Mode on Windows NT/2000/XP machines) and correcting the display settings.