Solved Not able to set up dual screen correctly on Nvidia 8800 GTS

[Axis75]

Hi everyone, have been trawling the forums here this evening looking for answers - a wealth of knowledge, but none that I could find to help my situation! So here I am: post number 1!

In short, this is an older PC build that has worked pretty much flawlessly for >6 years, the last 2 of those happily with dual screens (and dual booting Win7 Home and various iterations of Linux) - a Samsung 20" Syncmaster and a BenQ 22".

~4 months ago I made a stupid error when playing around with a VM and nuked the Windows install, so just switched over to the Ubuntu partition and kept at it. Finally found time to reinstall Win7 this weekend just been, but I cannot for the life of me get the dual screen back up and running properly.

At first it wouldn't even recognise the BenQ - problem was cable independent and DVI output independent. Eventually, through some fluke of unplugging/replugging/powering on/off I managed to get it to recognise the BenQ, but at 1024x768 max resolution. It also showed up as a "generic non-PNP monitor" rather than the BenQ 22" blurb I used to get.

Through some more trial and error I used the Nvidia software that came with the latest drivers to force a non-standard resolution (1680 x 1050 - native for this panel). This worked!

Briefly.

It will now work quite happily on a fresh boot, but any sign of power management, PNP hardware scan or wake from sleep and I'm back to the Samsung only, and nothing but a reboot will recover it.

To answer the obvious questions that come to my mind:
* Hardware is absolutely unchanged from working
* Hardware has not been moved in any way
* ONLY difference between working install and non-working install (as best I can tell) is Win7 Home vs. Ultimate. Both 32 bit.
* Monitor continues to be detected properly as a BenQ 22" in Ubuntu, so it would appear the monitor is still quite OK.
* All drivers have been updated to the latest to the best of my knowledge
* Win 7 install is current, fully updated and activated.

Thanks in advance for any and all help!!

Axis.

 

[AddRAM]

Download the latest video drivers from nvidia, a new driver just came out.

Do a custom clean install of the video drivers.

After that`s done make sure you choose - extend these displays - in screen resolution

right click the desktop, choose screen resolution, extend these displays

It should now work perfectly

 

[Axis75]

Thanks AddRAM - will give that a crack tonight. Can you define "clean custom install" for me?

Thanks.

 

[AddRAM]

when you install the nvidia drivers choose custom then choose to do a clean install, you`ll see what I mean when you do it. And don`t install 3D drivers if you don`t have 3D hardware, just uncheck those 2 boxes.

 

[Axis75]

Beautiful, thanks for that clarification.

 

[Axis75]

I've battled this all evening with several reinstalls of the drivers under different scenarios (BenQ plugged in, not plugged in, reboot etc etc). All that I managed to achieve was to completely remove the ability to display to the BenQ in Windows at all (still fine in Ubuntu etc). What was quite curious however is that the display properties still showed the monitor as connected at full res...

I trawled the dodgiest depths of the internet trying to find a driver for the BenQ monitor (as the official BenQ site doesn't have it, but I knew it existed as the manual refers to it) - and finally found one. On install it offered both analog and digital drivers. Installed these with high hopes but again no luck.

What I did note is that after installation of these, the description of the monitor changed from "Generic non-PNP monitor" to "Generic monitor on VGA" (or something similar) - curious.

This made me wonder if it was worth trying to connect to the VGA port on the BenQ - the Geforce 8800 GTS has two DVI's only, however I had a VGA cable and an old DVI->VGA converter kicking around.

Plugged these guys in and Success!

No idea what the heck was going on, and I'd much rather have it running through the DVI, but I can live with it. Cheers for the help!