Hey all
I recently bought a new MoBo and CPU, nothing impressive but better than my old stuff, and re-installed windows, drivers etc.
I'm having a slight problem with my 'Settings' tab of the Display Properties.

I have in my list of available monitors:
Plug and Play Monitor on ATI Radeon 9550 / X1050 Series and
(Default Monitor) on ATI Radeon 9550 / X1050 Series

The latter is obviously the one I want, seems to have a higher range of Screen resolutions available and such, and is already set to default.
I only ever installed the one monitor...I only have one, but it seems to be running through the Plug and Play one instead.

I've tried selecting the other one to be used as default and such but doesnt seem to work. Any ideas?
Thanks fo any suggestions

H0885

Is there actually a problem?

The reason you see two devices is because ATI graphics cards detect each "head" or output as a separate device. You will notice that if you attempt to tick and apply the Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor checkbox, it will fail. This is because there is no monitor.

(Default Monitor) is a essentially a place holder driver that Windows attaches to a graphics controller when there is no physical display device (imagine peeling a sticker off a box and seeing the words Place for Sticker). If you were to attach a monitor, it would detect it and configure a new Plug and Play Monitor. During this process, the graphics card queries the monitor through a mechanism called Display Data Channel (DDC) or Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) to get a list of possible resolutions, refresh rates and colour depths. Windows is supplied this information by the graphics driver and configures the Display Properties appropriately.

The resolutions the (Default Monitor) offers is everything your graphics card is capable of. However, many of these resolutions are useless (lets face it, there are basically a handful of useful ones...800x600, 1024x786, 1280x960, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200) and no monitor would offer to, or has the capability to, display all of them.


A piece of advice - if you see something you don't understand, don't jump to any conclusions, especially if you're not actually experiencing any problems

Well the problem is that the monitor that it does allow me to use seems to have the bare minimum of resolutions (800x600 or 1024x768).

This makes the computer seem as though the Graphics Drivers are outdated or something thus not delivering the full capabilities, which in turn makes my games run terrible in comparison to before.

If your monitor is a 15" LCD, it would not be unusual to have a maximum resolution of 1024x786. It is extremely doubtful that the graphics drivers would have anything to do with resolutions.

Have you ever had it running better than 1024x768?

Not really, it seems the optimum resolution for me, but it has had the option of going higher before I reformatted.

Even so, atleast the confusion has been sorted..i'll jsut put up with not having the higher option. I just thought it was something to do with my drivers not being properly installed or omething.

Cheers