PC Technical Question...

[ThinkingManNeil]

Hi All;

I will be the first to admit that I am not tech savvy (I've been a 24/7 caregiver for my mom for some years now so I just don't have the time to spend learning all the arcane in's and out's of hardware and software), so when something goes wonky with my system I'm pretty much at a loss to understand, explain. or correct what happened.

Tonight when I signed on to my PC, something odd happened. The windows I opened were larger than normal as were the fonts and anything displayed in them. All of the icons on my display (22" LG LCD flatscreen) have more than doubled in size and take up more than half of the screen now, where they used to take up less than a third of the left side of the monitor. I've tried adjusting the display through the control panel but it's made no difference.

Any suggestions or advice would be genuinely appreciated.

Thanks,

N.

[Dev One]

My first thought is to check your screen resolution.....try right click on your screen saver, then look in 'personalise' (W8.1, but I think its similar for earlier windows) you should then see a popup that allows you to change the pixels.
HTH
Keith

[Dave Torkington]

If it's not screen resolution then it could be that you've accidentally pressed 'CTRL' and mousewheel zoom which will adjust the size of desktop icons and fonts...

Dave.

[stansdds]

I just had the same thing happen to me after running Advanced System Care. It wiped out my video and audio drivers. Thank goodness my standard procedure before doing such scans is to create a restore point.

[Dumonceau]

Neil,

Rightclick on your computer icon (desktop or start menu), select "manage", go to device manager and see if your vid card is still recognized. if it is not, you have to reïnstall the drivers of the thing.

If it is, then most of the suggestions above apply!

Keep us posted if you will!

Johan

[hairyspin]

If it's not screen resolution then it could be that you've accidentally pressed 'CTRL' and mousewheel zoom which will adjust the size of desktop icons and fonts...

Dave.

We learn something new every day. Cheers, Dave!

[ThinkingManNeil]

OK, an update of sorts. I tried a system reset this morning, taking it back to a date a coupe of days ago, and that seemed to resolve the icons size issue of my opening page - for a while - but when I logged on this evening they were back to being twice their normal size and taking up much more monitor real estate than usual. But what happened next was unusual. I launched FSX to do a flight and everything was fine with the opening and set up pages, but when it came time to fly all I got was a blank, dark gray screen without any sound. I was able to exit it OK and shut down FSX without any difficulty. I then tried booting up IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 as a test and got even less - just a black screen - and there I couldn't exit normally and had to do a forced shutdown.

I checked on the status of my video card - an ATI Radeon 5450 - through the device manager and was told it was working properly, so I'm not sure of it's a driver issue or what. I've not dealt with this before so I'm not really sure how to proceed...

N.

[Jafo]

The only things that should affect the screen drawing 'scale' are display driver and/or OS desktop display settings.
If there is an issue with the 'advanced' drivers beyond the 'native/default' VGA driver you'll see large icons [VGA resolution] and games requiring higher driver function will likely fail.
That'll be either the drivers being corrupted/needing reinstall OR the graphic card is beginning to fail.

Solution...uninstall whatever driver is supposedly installed...and update/reinstall [new download].
If there is no luck you will likely need a new card.

If it's simply display settings you 'should' still see FSX or other games load/function, so that's unlikely to be your issue.


Whether you're a PC goo-roo, or a novice your weapon-of-choice is 'Google'.... a search for similar faults mentioned online 'may' lead you to a solution/diagnosis/remedy.
But remember....searching is all about 'GIGI'.... garbage in - garbage out. The quality of your results is matched by the quality of your search input...;)

[Jafo]

Forgot to mention...
When seeking online assistance it's a 'must' that you include such info as OS version and computer specs [CPU, ram size, etc] so others may be able to even do the 'search' for you...;)

[stansdds]

Something is resetting your screen resolution and that is likely what is causing problems with FSX. It could be that the video card driver has become corrupt, so you might want to reinstall the video card driver. If the resolution continues to reset, then you need to look at background programs. It is possible that an anti-virus or anti-malware program has decided that your driver is malware. It is also possible that an automatic update service is running and is messing with the video driver.

[ThinkingManNeil]

Hey guys;

Thanks for all of the advice so far. I'm going to assume, based on the majority of what you've all told me, that it's probably an issue with the video card driver so I'm going to try re-installing it. Now, next questions are should I uninstall the existing driver first or just overwrite it? Seek out the original driver and install that or choose the most recent update to it?

N.

[stovall]

My suggestion on installing video drivers is do a fresh install after removing those in place. If there is corruption somewhere, this procedure should correct that. Good luck.

[Jafo]

Hey guys;

Thanks for all of the advice so far. I'm going to assume, based on the majority of what you've all told me, that it's probably an issue with the video card driver so I'm going to try re-installing it. Now, next questions are should I uninstall the existing driver first or just overwrite it? Seek out the original driver and install that or choose the most recent update to it?

N.
Modern driver installs tend to be quasi-fool-proof in that they manage their own replacement methodology [you just update and they handle what's needed]...but generally it's wise to uninstall and replace.
When it comes to being sure to not introduce a new drama...try to install the ver that 'was' OK before things went screwy.

If you can't get past [what is likely to be] VGA resolution with a new driver install it means something is dying video-card-wise.

And when it comes to specifics...if your motherboard [whatever it is] has onboard graphics as well as an add-on card you 'could' be actually dealing with the wrong GPU ...and that's where it helps to clarify what hardware we're talking about...;)

[ThinkingManNeil]

OK, here are the basic specs on my system. Maybe this will give some added clarification.

Make: Dell Studio XPS 9000 purchased March, 2010
Motherboard: Unknown (Model and specs not listed on invoice)
Processor: Intel Core I7-960 processor (8MB L3-Cache 3.2GHz - no overclocking)
Memory: 12GB DDR3 SDRAM @ 1066MHz)
Primary Drive: 500GB Serial ATA 1 Hard Drive 7200 RPM
Secondary Drive: 1TB Serial ATA 2 Hard Drive 7200 RPM (This is where all my FS stuff is stored; FSX FS9, IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946. When I put this system together I wanted to make sure I had all my FS stuff dedicated to a separate drive)
Video Card: AMD Radeon 5450 (1GB)
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

N.