DescentBB

Desktop screen off center.

My Aunt has a Dell computer and a Princeton Digital Monitor VL193.

About every other day, when she boots up, the desktop is off center to the left or to the right and it can be two or three inches. She has to restart to get it to correct itself.

She has to use the Ctrl/Alt/delete to shutdown when it's off to the left.

Any ideas?

Adjust the monitor settings directly on the monitor. It should dtay that way. Also check to see if she has the correct video drivers and monitor drivers installed.

It could be that your computer/monitor isn't remembering the way you had it set before. The same thing happens to my machine (Dell, ATI Radeon X300 card, Dell M933s CRT monitor) all the time. About 50% of the time I start it up, I notice that the screen is a little mis-aligned, and I can see enough flicker to know that the refresh rate is set to 60 hz. The strange thing is that, when I open up ATI's control panel, its dialog box displays the refresh rate as 100 hz, even though the monitor's own menu shows 60 hz, which I can confirm from the flickering. When I switch the ATI control panel to 90 hz, and then revert back to 100, the monitor finally gets back to 100, and my screen is aligned again. Annoying as hell. The refresh rate control in the Display manager in the Control Panel doesn't affect it at all. I've never figured out if the problem lies with the Catalyst drivers or the monitor's, although I suspect the latter, since I've updated the Catalysts several times without any change. I've tried to install the monitor drivers that Dell's site provides, but I always get some message about them being older than the ones I already have. Who knows; maybe it's the same situation as yours. I wouldn't put it past Dell to have absolutely crappy drivers for their hardware.

This is easy to explain. The Monitor Refresh Rate changes the screen geometry. If the video drivers fail to load correctly, it's likely you'll get the default 60Hz Refresh Rate, and hence a displaced screen.

Best solution is to maximise the Refresh Rate at the desktop resolution and **THEN** adjust the screen geometry using the OSD on the front of the Monitor.

Read my dissertation at http://planetdescent.com/d3help/framerate.shtml for a good overview of this topic.

TopGun, install "PowerStrip" to enforce the refresh rate control at any and every resolution. You can also fine tune the screen geometry, and some of the things which are not available in the standard OSD with this application. It supports all known video cards.

Also... older monitors may not "remember" more than one or two screen positions. Might be time for an upgrade/replacement.

some moniters will keep their settings if they goto standby mode, but will hard-reset their settings when they are physically disconnected from power.

check if your aunt's moniter has power when the computer is turned off, or if she is also manually turning the moniter off.