Compaq desktop with screen problem

MothballsWallet

I'm working on a friend's Compaq desktop PC running Windows XP Home, connected to a Sony LCD monitor at the moment. I've previously helped him cure a blue screen of death by using my Compaq laptop's Windows XP CD to get a recovery console prompt and run CHKDSK to test the disk for errors and fix them.

This has worked to a point, but now something's wrong with the desktop: the screen image size seems to be larger than the visible area of the monitor - I've tried this on my own 17" CRT monitor as well, and both it and the LCD show this problem.

The taskbar is right at the bottom of the screen, the top edge barely visible on the screen. Changing the screen resolution settings doesn't do anything and, sadly, System Restore is disabled, so I can't use that to roll back to the most recent good setup.

The sound also doesn't work, so I'm thinking possible driver corruption, so I might try reinstalling the graphics and audio driver software as well to see if that will help.

I was thinking of trying the onboard software in the recovery partition, but was wondering if there was any other advice for things that I could try first? I've been told that there's nothing vital on the PC.

Taffybiker

MothballsWallet wrote: »

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The sound also doesn't work, so I'm thinking possible driver corruption, so I might try reinstalling the graphics and audio driver software as well to see if that will help

There's your answer. A fresh install does not always install the correct drivers. In this case you need to locate and install the drivers for video and sound.

MothballsWallet

Thanks, Taffybiker: I hope I've been given all the disks for the system: there's definitely a CD for the Sony monitor, but I'll check and see what he's given me.

closed

It's the graphics card driver you need.

MothballsWallet

Well, running chkdsk /p and chkdsk /p /r a few times from the recovery console on my Compaq laptop's Windows XP CD seemed to fix the display, but now some of the services (Cryptography and Remote Procedure Call) won't start, so I can't install software and Firefox thinks it's already running when I double-click its shortcut, even though (according to the Task Manager) it isn't.

If I use my own XP CD to reinstall Windows, that won't affect the stuff in My Documents, will it? As I think that might be the only way to fix it, or to go to Linux

Dime_Bar

MothballsWallet wrote: »

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If I use my own XP CD to reinstall Windows, that won't affect the stuff in My Documents, will it? As I think that might be the only way to fix it, or to go to Linux

If you reinstall and the current my documents are on the same partition as the OS then you will loose them.

At the point you are at I would be looking at reinstalling XP, back up all the documents in the my documents folder onto DVD/CD/HDD etc and make sure you do this for all user accounts.

It may be worth at this point running a full 3rd party disk check, something like one of the tools on the Ultimate Boot Disk would do, many are disk manufacture specific but there are some generic ones on there. This will mark any bad sectors as bad and leave you with a good drive.

Get onto the Compaq site and locate all the latest drivers for the machine and have them ready on a flash drive or cd and then reinstall.

Job done.