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More Vista Beta experiences

Today I did something rather rash. Well, actually it wasn’t that rash because I backed everything up first. I decided to delete Windows XP from my main computer and install Vista.

Of course, Vista drove right over my dual-boot configuration as usual, so I’m going to have to resurrect that at some point.

The Aero UI is beautiful especially with my Geforce 6600 GT, but I did run into a bit of a problem. My monitor is a CTX VL950 19″ CRT. No OS I’ve yet used automatically recognises the monitor settings, except Fedora Core 5 Linux if you give it some help identifying the model.

For XP, I had to get the monitor drivers from CTX to run at above 60 Hz, which is important on a CRT. Unfortunately, these drivers failed to install on Vista.

To cut a long story short, I needed a way to override the refresh rate for the monitor but I kept being greeted with a greyed-out tickbox to allow override. The solution was this:

  • Create a shortcut to control.exe on the desktop.
  • Right-click and choose Run as administrator.
  • Now browse through Appearance and Personalisation and choose Adjust Screen Resolution.
  • Choose Advanced Settings and on the Monitor tab you can untick Hide modes… and select your desired refresh rate.

Be warned: If you use this method and choose something your monitor doesn’t support, it might stop working, so I accept no responsibility for anything you do here.

Hope this helps someone…

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One Comment

  1. sjaak wrote:

    i have a ctx vl950 for 9 years now.. it works deliciously, and is recognised by name in windows 98/98se/2000 en now XP

    Wednesday, December 6, 2006 at 11:15 | Permalink |

1 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Gizbuzz » Vista In-Depth: Stability & Compatibility on Friday, June 23, 2006 at 15:10

    […] However, the next problem was my monitor. I’ve got a CRT monitor, so driving it at 60Hz makes it ridiculously flickery. Usually, I’d just download the monitor drivers for Windows XP from the CTX website. These unfortuantely, failed to install in Vista. Having said that, I did find a workaround for the refresh rate issue. […]

  2. […] So the problem (as ever) started with my unusual monitor (how I fixed it in Windows). With the NVIDIA 3D driver installed, it would never run at a high resolution (above 1024×768) and never do anything above 60Hz. After some frantic searching on the nvNews Linux Forum, I found out some commands that might allow me to override resolution. I can’t quite remember what made it work, but I will post my xorg.conf configuration file if it anyone wants it. […]

  3. […] My first impressions are good. It boots pretty quickly for a live distro, and hardware compatibility on this machine was very good. The only thing Ubuntu couldn’t handle properly was my 19″ CRT, but nothing seems to manage that. It ran at 1280×1024@60Hz, which was a good resolution but a very poor refresh rate. […]

  4. Xgl on Fedora – finally! « Blog « Peter Upfold on Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 19:20

    […] the problem (as ever) started with my unusual monitor (how I fixed it in Windows). With the NVIDIA 3D driver installed, it would never run at a high resolution (above […]

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