Startup resolution stuck at 640x480

[Yamyam]

Help! My monitor always defaults to 640x480 resolution at bootup. I can change it later, but the next time I reboot it resets to 640x480 again. How can I make it remember its resolution?

My configuration:
Athlon 2400, Asus A7N8X-E, Sapphire Radeon 9600, 512 Mb RAM, Raptor drive. WinXP with SP1 and updates, Catalyst 7-97-031212a (driver version 6.14.10.6414).

Please advise?

 

[SwampsterFL]

Make sure your motherboard drivers are installed correctly (in particular, the AGP driver), then after this if it doesn't correct itself, then remove the video card via Device Manager and reinstall it by the instructions that came with the card when it reboots.

 

[Yamyam]

Hmm. I spent most of last night trying several AGP/chipset and videocard drivers, but none of them worked any better. I guess I'll start jiggling cards cables tonight.

This seems very strange, because the exact same hardware configuration was just fine a few days ago, before I began the latest system rebuild.

 

[ericb]

That is weird because XP should default to 800x600 and not even allow 640x480 unless it's booting into safe mode. Did you try setting the video to a default card, restarting and then installing the Catalyst version you need?

 

[Yamyam]

Yep, tried that.

I think I found the problem: late-model Radeon cards sometimes become unstable if the WinXP advanced performance control panel is set to "Server cache" rather than "application performance." I can't find much information about WHY this is a problem, but I changed my setting and sure enough, the problem cleared up immediately. This also eliminated an intermittent problem with "Windows: Delayed Write Failure" that may have corrupted my system files.