I remoted into our home PC running XP, from my macbook pro, via microsoft remote desktop for mac. Now the monitor directly connected to the desktop does not work. It gets no response from the desktop whatsoever, not even on a restart, no BIOS screen, nothing. Any idea what the problem is. I disconnected my session, and power cycled the monitor and desktop, still nothing. Any help is greatly appreciated. edit: the connection is via VGA. I can still remote into the PC with no problem. it is not a separate graphics card, the vga port is integrated into the motherboard.

unplug the monitor connection and see if the failed notice shows on the monitor! In reference to 11/05/2008 "So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause." - George Lucas

the monitor just gives a "no signal" error, then goes to sleep i think. update: device manager gives this message for Nvidia Geforce 6150 (onboard graphics): This device cannot start. (Code 10) I tried updating driver. as well as disabling and re-enabling. the error does not go away.

Have you tried another monitor to rule that out? If that's not it you could try a spare video card if you have one and if that machine accepts one. It could be as simple that the video adapter just hapened to fail at that time. I once ran a remote shutdown command over the network to one of my PCs. I was then unable to restart that machine. Turned out that the power supply had gone bad and once it shut down it was never to work again. Michael J

The video card has died is what I would think. When the drivers are bad, xp will auto install generic drivers to be able to use the computer....if XP cannot install the generic drivers the card has gone bye-bye. In reference to 11/05/2008 "So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause." - George Lucas

thanks for the help guys. I ended up opening up the tower and was going to throw in a graphics card from an older pc, but I decided to try to reseat the vga adapter on the mobo, I booted up again and voila, it worked. So in the end, completely unrelated to remote desktop...someone must have tried to unplug the monitor and accidentally pulled on it a bit too hard.