My brother recently bought a Dell flat panel monitor and he hooked it up to my Toshiba laptop to try it out. The picture on the dell monitor is very grainy and the colors do not display properly, for example some blues turn out as green. I disconnected the Dell monitor from my laptop and the picture on my laptop screen continues to be grainy and colors wrong. Everything was fine before the Dell monitor was hooked up, it's obvious it has something to do with the Dell monitor.

I think when the Dell was hooked up it may have overwritten some drivers. Could this be it, and if so where and what drivers do I get to get my laptop screen working properly? Thanks in advance for any help.
If you could help me it would be much appreciated. Thanks, EC

Your display adapter drivers got changed during the installation of the monitor.

Toshiba may have them on their website.

Check in device manager to see how the monitor and display adapter are identified. You may need to manually change things there back to the laptop screen.

Since the drivers were there before they probably still are so hopefully you won't have to hunt them down.

I checked in the Device Manager but I know nothing about computers so it doesn't make much sense to me. Under "adapter drivers" it says Trident Cyber9525DVD PCI/AGP W98(22_2) and under monitors it shows 2 monitor icons which say "plug and play monitor". I have no idea what this stuff means, my Toshiba is a Satellite, model 2250CDT

Remove the 2 monitor icons shown in device manager and reboot.

If the problem remains, go to 'display' in control panel and click 'settings'. Adjust the 'color' settings to something higher.

I removed the two montior icons and it didn't solve the problem, instead I'm now getting everytime I start the computer a gray box which says: "UNKNOWN DEVICE windows has found new hardware and is locating the software for it"
Then the "ADD NEW HARDWARE WIZARD" pops up which says "This wizard searches for new drivers for: plug and play monitor". I click cancel and the hardware wizard box comes up again, I click cancel again and the first box comes up (UNKNOWN DEVICE), then it disapears and the desktop loads.

I might add that this is what happened when the flat panel monitor was hooked up.

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/su/su_sc_modItemList.jsp

The drivers should be there. When the box pops up, keep hitting 'next' or 'continue' or 'OK' (or whatever continues the process) and it should automatically locate the driver info in the windows\inf folder.

The thing is I don't have any "unknown device", I think that my notebook is recognizing the Dell monitor even though it's not hooked up to it. I just don't get what's going on.

When the hardware wizard pops up it says it searches drivers for a plug and play monitor which I don't have. I tried clicking "next" in the wizard and have it look for suitable drivers on my computer which it found, when I clicked "finish" another hardware wizard popped up saying the same thing, this time I clicked "cancel" and the desktop loaded.

I went to the Device Manager and it had one plug and play monitor icon. I restarted the computer and this time the hardware wizard popped up only once, I clicked "cancel" and the desktop loaded. I haven't tried it yet but I'm pretty sure that if I click"next" in the wizard and have it locate new drivers on my computer I will end up with a second plug and play monitor icon in the Device Manager and the hardware wizard will not pop up anymore.

So what do I do, download drivers for the Dell monitor?? I don't want the Dell monitor, how do I get it off my notebook?

First of all, quit hitting 'cancel'. When you do that you guarantee that the box will pop up the next time you boot up. Just keep hitting 'next'.

I don't know if two monitors showing is correct for your laptop. Or maybe it's a cmos setting or maybe the adapter needs to be configured in display properties.

This is the download site for that model. It doesn't show any separate monitor drivers. It shows downloads for the display adapter but that seems to be set up properly anyway on your laptop.

Did you try increasing the number of colors in display properties--settings? What is it set at now? What monitor does it show there?

I made a print screen of my display properties so you can see what it looks like. When I pasted the image into a graphics program and tried to resize it something really weird happened, I got a popup box saying "Resampling is only supported for
greyscale or 24 bit true color images". I did print screens lots of times in the past and this is the first time it's happened. Here's the url to the webpage with the display properties images, it might take a little bit to load since I wasn't able to reduce the size -
http://dogshop.port5.com/display.htm

It looks like you have the ability to configure each possible monitor differently even though only one, your laptop screen, is there now. From your explanation, I think the laptop display is 'monitor 1'. I think it's possible that's the way it always was but you didn't notice it until you had these problems.

That's an option added by the video adapter drivers and not a general windows display function so I'm not sure how to tell you to fix it. Well, if you can increase the colors to more than 256 it might help. The refresh rate can also be a factor.

There are a couple of things to try if you can't get it figured out. If this problem is recent you may be able to restore a previous registry. The OS normally creates a backup for each day you use the computer. But it only keep the last 5 or so. To restore a registry choose 'shut down' and then 'restart in msdos mode'. At the prompt type scanreg/restore and enter. Then choose a registry to restore with a date that precedes your using the dell monitor.

If that doesn't work or if there's no registry date that old, go to 'add/remove programs' in control panel and see if you can remove the video adapter drivers. Once it's uninstalled it should set up as a generic adapter. Then run the normal video installation either from the original disk or from a download from my link above.

The video adapter would be the trident cyber hardware. That's what you'd look for in 'add/remove programs' if you were going to uninstall those drivers.

Good news, my brother came over today and fixed the problem. Turned out I didn't need to reinstall anything. He clicked the Toshiba hardware setup, went to the "display" tab, hit the default button then the reset button. Next he went to the Display properties settings and picked the True Color(32 bit) in the colors drop down box(before that the 32 bit color wouldn't work). And that was it, my computer is back to normal. Thanks everyone for your time and trying to help me out, I appreciate it.

You're welcome. I'm glad you got it fixed. I thought it was probably a configuration problem but since I was unfamiliar with your system I wasn't sure how to go about fixing it.