I have a user who said that when he rebooted his Windows 10 machine last night, nothing showed up on the displays after the Windows boot splash screen:
The machine has clearly finished booting though, because he can remote in and all works as expected. First thought is video card. I have an identical spare machine so I swapped out the video card. Same issue. I put his old card in the spare machine and hooked it up to his monitors and everything works. OK, I’ll take the hard drives from his machine an put them in the spare. The problem returns. WTF? How is this problem following the hard drive?
The only thing I can thing of is a driver / windows update issue.
Nope. Our updates are controlled by IT.
It turned out to be something simple but non-obvious. The user got a new standing desk yesterday. While setting it up, he dropped a monitor and the display had lovely rainbows in one corner. He swapped it for an identical monitor. It turns out that Windows remembered the old monitor and was trying to display there instead of to the connected monitor. Device Manager actually showed 4 monitors (there are only two), so we had to muck around in the Display Settings to figure out which of the 4 was the ‘new’ one to make it the primary.
I wish Windows had a ‘this is a a desktop machine’ toggle so that silly stuff like this could be prevented.
3 Likes
Windows monitor handling leave something to be deisred. Especially with a laptop and docking station. I fight this at least once a week going back and forth from my home office and work.
3 Likes
