I have a working monitor again. Walt took
my monitor upstairs and connected both his desktop and laptop to it and could not get any
picture either, so we successfully diagnosed the problem as a dead monitor. He
remembers that he bought it at Best Buy in Sacramento which went out of business many
years ago, so it's not surprising that the monitor, which rarely gets turned off,
has lived out its life, having given me many happy hours of pleasure along the way.
Next step was to go and buy a new monitor.
It appears that my old flat screen monitor was 15" and this one is 20"
but it takes less space on my desk, which is lovely. It's an HP 52031, for those of
you for whom that means something. And it's very pretty. :)
We brought it home and went about setting it
up. Not much to do, really, but unplug the computer, attach the monitor, plug in the
monitor, plug the computer back in again and fire the system up.
But of course it wasn't that easy.
It looked great and the software that came on a
disk seemed to be installing. It worked, and I could access the menu for monitor
control. But...uh...it was not perfect. I was disappointed that my choices,
according to the monitor menu, seemed to be have everything in the center of the screen,
which gave me the appropriate dimensions on photos but teeny typeface for everything else,
or I could opt for using the full screen, which stretched all the photos to fit the
screen, but nothing was in proportion. I know I'm fat, but I'm not THAT fat!
I tried everything and finally decided I'd
learn to live with it, though I hated the look of the playing screen for FreeCell and
Spider Solitaire.
But when I went to connect to the internet and
to change my DCN mail delivery from forwarding it to Gmail and back to leaving it on the
local server, I couldn't connect because I got a message that the site had an invalid
certificate and shouldn't be trusted. I'd never seen that message before.
The beauty of having a local server is that you
can actually call them and they answer right away, look up your problem and get back to
you right away. Every time something like this happens, I know why I pay more for
DCN then, for example, Comcast as my provider. He couldn't figure out the problem,
but asked me if I had checked the battery on my computer. BINGO. I remembered
that the guru was going to change the flat battery in my computer that runs the clock and
associated programs, but he forgot to do it. Instead he gave me the battery and
showed me where to put it. It involves opening the computer and trying to remember
where he said to do it, which I think I can do, but before I can do THAT, I have to clean
off my whole desk and I just hadn't gotten around to it.
But once I re-set the clock (which goes back to
2003 every time the computer is unplugged), things were fine.
I played around with settings some more and
finally posted a message on Facebook about my disappointment with the look of things.
The Cavalry, in the form of Bill Walsh and Paul Zawilski, both Lamplighters, came
to the rescue. I explained that everything I read said that the optimum
configuration was 1600 x 900 but all of my settings said that mine was at 1280 x
1024 and I couldn't figure out how to reset it. It was Paul who asked me if I had
opened the display panel on the computer itself. I did that, checked the settings
and in seconds had changed it to 1600 x 900 and the whole thing became the way it was
supposed to be.
Now I have this beautiful wide monitor that
looks beautiful, shows things the way they should be seen, and I hope will give me many
more years of service.
Thank you, Paul and Bill! I do
love Facebook!
1 comment:
Yay!!! You are back in action! I had similar monitor set up problems last year and got them resolved by calling my local guru.
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