I haven't been able to find another post detailing this kind of behaviour, so here goes
I've got an old Dell laptop (Vostro 1430) which I recently installed Mint 18.2 on. It has a 1366x768 inbuilt display which works fine. It also has Nvidia 310M switchable graphics card, which I have been able to set up with the proprietary drivers just fine.
For some time I've also used it with a extra monitor (borrowed an old Dell - can't remember the resolution) which also worked just fine for many months (plugged into the VGA port).
Yesterday I gave back the old monitor and bought a cheap 18.5" Acer (E1900HQ) to replace it. It also has a 1366 x 768 native resolution. I set it up, powered it on and plugged in the VGA cable. it all worked perfectly and everything displayed as expected. I left the computer powered on throughout the day and came back to it several times (several resumes from screensaver/screen sleep). Each time the Acer screen came back at the correct resolution and aspect ratio. UNTIL ....
When I came back to resume again at 8pm the Firefox window had been stretched horizontally such that the right hand 2 inches of screen space was off the side of the display (invisible). Checking Preferences/Display showed that the native resolution was correctly selected.
I've tried changing and resetting the resolution via Preferences/Display, unplugging and re plugging the VGA cable, switching the monitor off and on, rebooting the computer. To no avail
Because I've got the 310M I tried running:
Code: Select all
sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-340
sudo dpkg-reconfigure mdm
gsettings reset-recursively org.cinnamonThe nvidia settings app doesn't think there are any displays other than "screen 0" (whatever that means).
Now in order to display on the Acer in a usable way, I have to select a 1280 x 720 resolution which, although usable, is quite poor. When switching the machine on this morning it now automatically selects 1280 x 720, and choosing 1366 x 768 produces the same problem.
The laptop's own display has been unaffected.
What I really can't understand is the fact that the Acer monitor was displaying perfectly as expected for almost an entire day, and then suddenly decided not to!
There has been no installation of updates at any point during this process.
Does anyone have any ideas of what I could do to fix it?
Sorry to be so verbose but I've always felt that too much detail is better than too little.
