I was typing along this morning, minding my own business, when my machine rebooted. I have an nVidia GeForce 8400GS card that supports two monitors, one digital, the other analog. I use the smaller, analog screen (1280 x 1024) as the one with the top and bottom bars with menus and open program buttons, and the digital screen (1680 x 1050) for extra space. When the machine came back up the Ubuntu logo showed up on the right screen, (which is normal). Shortly after that the right screen went blank, and the left screen had half the wallpaper showing. I heard the Ubuntu two-note sound telling me that it was waiting for me to log in, so I logged in. I can move the cursor to the left and the rest of the wallpaper shifts so that it fills the screen mostly the way it used to. I'm thinking that somehow the driver thinks this smaller monitor has the real estate of the larger one, sort of.
Anyway, does this sound like the video card is failing? It's only a couple years old. It does have a poor bearing in the chip fan, and has made noise for some months, now. It's still making noise as I type, so I'm pretty sure the fan is still running. I can bring up the nVidia X Server Settings tool and see that the internal temperature is 41C. I haven't looked at that in the past, so I don't have a reference for whether that's good, bad, or indifferent. When I look at the XServer Display Configuration it shows the digital screen is off. Normally it's on. The configuration is set to Twin View. Normally that's set to Separate X Screen. When I click on the right hand monitor (in the tool) the resolution shows as off. If I change that to 1680 x 1050 and click Apply, nothing happens. This is what's making me think the card is failing, or at least part of it has failed. Any recommendations? Assuming the card has failed, any recommendations on a better nVidia card? Thanks. BTW, I set the auto save feature of LibreOffice to 1 minute, and recovered most of the work I was doing. -- Regards, Dick Steffens _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
