SOLVED... after tightened the VGA cable on the monitor!
Thanks a lot to this thread! Thinking of that should be immediate, but is NOT in some cases, as the one I fell in, so I detail it:
My PC is a DELL Latitude e4300 (NBCheck, AmznCOM, DELL).
Its only external graphic output is VGA. System is Windows 7 64bit Pro (with XP Mode, not concerned here).
It is connected through VGA to my Iiyama ProLite B2274HDS-B2 (bought 161.28 EUR on 11 Apr 2012 from AmznFR, also see IiyamaFR, AmznCOUK, LCD-Compare).
I used to display the main desktop on the Latitude 13in 1280×800 integrated LCD, and all the main stuff on the Iiyama, set to its 1920×1080 natural resolution. This had worked perfect, daily for one year or two.
Then yesterday Sun 07 Aug 2016 I wanted to listen to an entire music album (which I never did before on that little old PC). Looking for WMP, that I had used for ripping CDs to mp3, I stumbled on WMC, that I never used before, so WMC wanted to reconfigure my system, which I refused for all the Library and such, but accepted for tuning Audio and Video.
WMC made a mess! The Iiyama monitor went black, then by unplugging the VGA cable I brought all my open Chrome windows with their tabs back on the integrated LCD, but they were unresponsive and unusable; everything else worked, but Chrome had actually crashed, in a way I never seen before.
I rebooted the PC, and then the Iiyama monitor was still displaying in the reduced and distorted 1600×1200 resolution (I felt back in 1998!).
Control Panel Display, whether for the monitor (which was no more listed as "iiyama ProLite PL2274HD" but as a mundane non-Plug-and-Play monitor) or for the Intel graphics card, offered no resolution above 1600×1200.
So I thought that WMC had broken something in the driver settings, or in the driver itself.
I thought of changing the Iiyama B2274HDS driver, or the Intel Mobile Intel(R) 4 Series Express Chipset Family driver, but I discovered that updating drivers has now become much more difficult: all the helpful sites that used to scan your system and find the right drivers have gone down; Google "Iiyama ProLite b2274hds driver", at my deep surprise, returned nothing useful; trying directly Iiyama or Intel didn't return useful info any more; trying Google "1920x1080 resolution option disappeared" returned a couple irrelevant or useless sites, BUT this one, missing 1920x1080 resolution: I browsed and tightened everything, found an USB hub power was disconnected, the VGA cable was loose as it often does on the PC end (the e4300 VGA connector lacks the usual 2 screws). After trying everything, nothing worked, the image was still distorted. So I went to the VGA cable monitor end, and found that yes, despite it was apparently still fully and correctly plugged and had NOT been (and should NOT be) subject to any problem for years, yes it was somewhat loose. I tightened it, screwed its 2 screws (that out of laziness I hadn't when I plugged it a few years ago), and the image came back OK!
How could I guess that my problem with WMC had caused or accompanied or hidden an un-tightening of the VGA cable monitor end?
Sorry for the length, hope this helps.
(Note to moderator: if this message got posted elsewhere than under this very thread, its usefulness, already low, would become null. So, please either delete it, or leave it in place, but don't move it elsewhere. TIA!)
Versailles, Mon 08 Aug 2016 15:37:00 +0200
