NT Display problem

[delmer_1]

Yesterday at about 4:55pm (i get done working at 5) one of our users comes into our department. I was in talking to my boss, getting ready to leave. HE asks if we knew anything about the GPMate system. (GPMate is a program that the maintenance people use to keep track of their work orders, it was written by some tiny little company. we all hate it) anyway I decided to go look at his problem. So as we are walking though teh plant to get to where his PC is..he proceeds to try to tell me what happened. I didn't understand much of what he was telling me other than teh word screensave and that me adjusted something the whole way up...now his screen says Sync: out of range. This made me happy, knowing that it was not a problem with this horrible software that i know very little about. i get down there, reboot his PC and found out he was using NT4 workstation. I figured well, i'll just boot to VGA mode, adjust his display settings, reboot and it will be done. boy was i wrong. When i choose VGA mode, it still goes black and says SYNC: out of range. I thought VGA mode was supposed to reset teh resolution, color depth, and refresh rate back to minimum settings. I then removed the video card and turned the PC on, it beeped letting me know that it wasn't there. i then turned it back off, inserted teh card and tried it again...same problem. I then tried another monitor(brand new Dell) because his monitor was pretty old and i was hoping that the new monitor was able to handle the higher settings, but it wasn't.But it did tell me what the settings were. it says 75k/60Hz is out of range. I then tried a PCI video card(the original was AGP) it gives me an error saying that display_driver.dll is missing and then it begins a memory dump. I had my boss take a look at it, and he was unable to make it work either. is suggestion was to insert a windows 2000 CD and do an upgrade. But the only problem is that these old IBM computers that we have which are running NT4 are set up with a 2GB, FAT16, c: partition, and then a larger ntfs partition. Normally when we upgrade, we backup data to the network, partion the drive into one large partition and format it. because these people tend to fill up their C: drive and the D drive is usually empty.

so basically, is there anyway to reset the refresh rate on this machine without reinstalling?

[Ya_know]

It seems you have tried a bunch of things already. There is always remote registry access, provided that you have admin group memgership to the PC you could Connect to Network registry. Take a look at this article for refresh settings. Good luck understanding the values, but it is a start:

Hardware Registry Secrets

[delmer_1]

that would help if i knew the name of the PC, but unfortunatly i do not.

I have so far managed to get it to log in and open the display properties in the control panel(at least i think..i am using hard drive activity as an indicator of success) I tab through the options to where the refresh rate is, but no matter how i try to change it, it doesn't work. if only there was a way to adjust this stuff from a boot disk.

[Ya_know]

Originally posted by delmer_1
that would help if i knew the name of the PC, but unfortunatly i do not.

That is a problem in itself. These PC's should be labeled, or records maintained just for that reason. Is it possible to browse to it, could it use a person’s name? I am just so curious as to if this reg stuff will help...I have never done it myself.

[delmer_1]

well, for teh most part we know which PC goes with which user. We use the employee's first and last name as the computer name. However, this PC has been in place for quite a while now and it is a multiple user machine, and therefor is should be named after the area it is located, but it is in the maintenance area and i cant find any PC names on teh network that are named anything like maintenance. I got the names of the people who use that computer, but it isn't named after any of them either. looks like i will try to upgrade it to 2000, but that will have to wait till after lunch.

[delmer_1]

sorry for double posting.

i found out that after all of this, they only use this PC for accessing that stupid GPMate software...nobody has email or anything else on it..so after all of that..i just partitioned, formatted and installed windows 2000 and GPMate. if i would have known that..i wouldn't have wasted my time.

[CeeBee]

You can try with a newer & better monitor that supports higher refresh rates & resolutions.
If you don't know the computer name you can use something like Essential Net Tools, and based on the MAC address of the network card you'll have machine's name.