Date: 31/1/2006
| I've found that when you hook an XP machine up to a KVM and boot it while the KVM is displaying the other machine, XP sees there is no monitor attached and ignores the refresh rate set in the display settings. In my case I want 1280x1024@32bpp and 75hz refresh. Which is fine if I boot the machine with the KVM switched to the XP box, otherwise the machine boots into 1280x1024@32bpp and 85hz refresh. When I do switch the KVM to the XP box the LCD says "Input Out Of Range". Now I wrote a command line program to tell me the current screen mode, ssh'd in from the Mac mini while XP was in this "Out Of Range" mode and ran the cmd line app. Thus I actually know what the out of range mode is.
The next step of course is to stop XP from setting the refresh to 85hz. Now I've googled around and some people seem to think that there might be an Nvidia registry setting that forces the refresh rate but so far no luck in getting that to work.
I added some functionality to my cmd line app to set the video mode (inc refresh) as well, and then called it from a remote ssh shell, but it complains about not being able to set the video mode. Which is not surprising I guess. (It does work fine from the local console.)
Now I'm thinking that maybe a Windows service needs to be installed that sits there polling the video mode and then if it sees an out of range mode it tries to reset the screen to some default. I havn't written a service before and I have my doubts as to whether a service can change the screen resolution/refresh. But it's worth a try.
The reason I would have to run it as a service is that when the machine boots, it goes to the select account screen that has no user actually logged in. At this point I only have services running, thus the need to run as a service. Otherwise I have to log in blind. Which is actually what I do to fix the problem at the moment. Log in as one user and then log in as another user, all blind, using the keyboard only. XP resets the screen mode when logging in to the 2nd account and the LCD shows the desktop.
I'm not even sure if it's the video card, XP or the KVM at fault but it's really really annoying.
*sigh*
Update: Last night I installed the resolution check cmd line app in the "All Users" startup folder such that it checks the resolution and refresh and changes it to something acceptable while logging in to each account. This way all I have to do is hit enter when the machine has finished booting and it'll switch to a valid screen mode. So while it's not "ideal" it's now a fairly benign problem.
I've packaged the res/refresh change program (with source) and made it available here.
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