Display Problem After Power Outage in Middle of Windows Updates

I read post #10 several times.

I then look at my own Display settings just to confirm: monitor's native rez is 1920x1080. That also happens to be the recommended AND maximum rez allowed.

So, is there a misunderstanding or miscommunication?

If the 1024x768 is your friend's monitor's max rez, then why not just connect the pc to that and see how that fares, vis a vis the interrupted Update and repair install?

Fiddling with reconfiguring the pc on your own non-widescreen and widescreen monitors seemed nonproductive. Especially since the two monitors are probably different from your friend's.

pyramid10 said:

I read post #10 several times.

I then look at my own Display settings just to confirm: monitor's native rez is 1920x1080. That also happens to be the recommended AND maximum rez allowed.

So, is there a misunderstanding or miscommunication?

You've lost me. What do your display settings have do to with this? And where is the misunderstanding or miscommunication? Unless you're telling me that on every computer, the recommended and maximum resolution are always the same. Is that what you're saying? I did a quick check on the laptop I'm using for this reply - the resolution is set to 1366 x 768. That is also the recommended and max setting. I'll have to check our 4 other PCs and see if that's the case.

But just to reiterate - the monitor I'm using with my friend's tower is my own monitor (although at this point I'm really wishing I'd brought his monitor and not just his tower). My monitor is a spare - not used regularly. Way back in post #1 I relayed what happened when I connected my friend's tower to my flat, non-widescreen monitor. The rez values I provided in post #10 are accurate

• max 1600 x 1200
• rec 1024 x 768
• current 1152 x 864

Unfortunately I do not know what the rez settings were/are on my friend's monitor. I assumed that something had gone wrong with his monitor, perhaps because of the power outage, and that connecting his tower to a monitor of mine would correct the display. Obviously I was wrong.

pyramid10 said:

If the 1024x768 is your friend's monitor's max rez, then why not just connect the pc to that and see how that fares, vis a vis the interrupted Update and repair install?

At my friend's house I did fiddle with his rez values because he and his wife had already spent several hours tinkering with the settings. I, of course, did try setting his rez to the defaults, without success. I also tried setting his resolution to the recommended 1024 x 768 here at my house, connected to my monitor. If you like I could send you a screenshot of how awful that looked. Everything was stretched. There was a wide black bar on the right side of the screen. And the icons were actually running off the left side of the screen.

Here is 1024 x 768 (recommended) display and the screen I see in Display Settings

boweasel said:

Unfortunately I do not know what the rez settings were/are on my friend's monitor. I assumed that something had gone wrong with his monitor, perhaps because of the power outage, and that connecting his tower to a monitor of mine would correct the display.

I think this is key. You really need to get his settings and use them, or better still his monitor.

You could try opening Device Manager and under Monitors, uninstall the current monitor. Then see if scanning for new hardware correctly detects and sets it up to use your monitor.