From day 1 - sometime in 2014 - my recording PC has occasionally, but regularly, failed to boot up. I have two monitors and I think two actual different video cards - but I could be wrong on that. Can't see any evidence for it in Win 7 Device Manager.
Every time it did this, I would just push the off button, let it power down, and then start it up again and on every single occasion it has powered up. Never missed once.
Now that I'm full time WFH, I've re-purposed one of my screens out of the studio and onto the dining table which is my work desk. Since I've done this - and I've been doing a shit load of starting and stopping the recording PC in the 4 months since - it has not once failed to boot up first time. Which is good.
Thus I'm thinking that it's actually a/the video card that's the issue here - the PC might have booted up OK but I can't see that it has. But this is beyond my level of understanding of how these things work at a core level. Using two screens it boots first to the smaller screen, but the second, larger screen becomes the main screen very quickly - it's from an SSD so it's a quick process. So perhaps what's happening is it's actually booting up OK but flicking to the larger screen, something goes wrong, so I can't actually see that it's booted up at all, assume it hasn't, and turn it off.
Curious. Anyone have a theory?
Riddle me this???
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vomitHatSteve
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Re: Riddle me this???
That's a pretty plausible explanation
What kind of connection is the larger screen? If it's hdmi, thosecan be a little pickier than vga or dvi
What kind of connection is the larger screen? If it's hdmi, thosecan be a little pickier than vga or dvi
Re: Riddle me this???
It's actually Display Port - the smaller (now disconnected) screen is DVI.vomitHatSteve wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 11:58 am That's a pretty plausible explanation
What kind of connection is the larger screen? If it's hdmi, thosecan be a little pickier than vga or dvi
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vomitHatSteve
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Re: Riddle me this???
I'd never heard of display port, but some quick ducking says it's digital. Any digital monitor may be pickier about detection than an analog one
Re: Riddle me this???
I've been mulling this over for a bit now and I'm not exactly sure what's happening under the hood. Is this a desktop PC, or a laptop? If it's a desktop you can quickly verify if there's a discrete graphics card plugged into one of the PCIe slots by looking at the back of the machine. There'll be the video outputs in the main "bank" of I/O that's connected directly to the motherboard (next to the USB ports, ethernet port, etc). If there's one or more video outputs oriented the other direction on one of the slots away from the main bank of I/O, then that's almost certainly a discrete graphics card.
If there is a graphics card and it's not showing up in Device Manager, you could try to determine the make/model of it and go grab updated drivers for it. It's probably listed somewhere in Device Manager as "Unknown Device" which won't be much help. It might be easier to open the chassis and look at it directly, to see if there is a make/model printed on it. If you can update the drivers and verify that it's working as expected, you could go into the BIOS and disable the on-board graphics to avoid confusing the computer. Although they should be able to coexist happily together.
If there isn't a graphics card, I'm really not sure why it's behaving this way. You could go to the motherboard manufacturer's website and check for chipset updates or BIOS updates for the motherboard.
Oh, and DisplayPort is the latest and greatest video connection for PCs. It's basically an evolution of HDMI that supports higher resolutions/refresh rates. Gamers love DP since it allows the use of higher refresh rate monitors and can do high resolution and high framerates. It's pretty standard on graphics cards these days. I haven't seen it built into motherboards much, I guess since most integrated graphics don't have the horsepower to take advantage of the higher bandwidth supported by DP.
If there is a graphics card and it's not showing up in Device Manager, you could try to determine the make/model of it and go grab updated drivers for it. It's probably listed somewhere in Device Manager as "Unknown Device" which won't be much help. It might be easier to open the chassis and look at it directly, to see if there is a make/model printed on it. If you can update the drivers and verify that it's working as expected, you could go into the BIOS and disable the on-board graphics to avoid confusing the computer. Although they should be able to coexist happily together.
If there isn't a graphics card, I'm really not sure why it's behaving this way. You could go to the motherboard manufacturer's website and check for chipset updates or BIOS updates for the motherboard.
Oh, and DisplayPort is the latest and greatest video connection for PCs. It's basically an evolution of HDMI that supports higher resolutions/refresh rates. Gamers love DP since it allows the use of higher refresh rate monitors and can do high resolution and high framerates. It's pretty standard on graphics cards these days. I haven't seen it built into motherboards much, I guess since most integrated graphics don't have the horsepower to take advantage of the higher bandwidth supported by DP.
Re: Riddle me this???
Thanks [mention]Tadpui[/mention] . It's a desktop - and, to explain a bit more, there's a discrete graphics card in Device Manager. When I bought it I didn't really know all that much about how graphics worked in 'puters and my cousin was working for HP and helped spec the machine and got it at half price for me due to staff discounts. Knowing what it was to be used for, and that I was getting a second screen at the same time, he suggested getting a discrete graphics card - now I'm aware enough to know that your basic computer will have "on-board" graphics in the same way it has "on-board" sound - which I assume is somehow integrated into the motherboard and is enough to do basic duties but you wouldn't want to be gaming with it.
But, here's where it gets tricky - the CPU in this machine is a Xeon - I believe at the time more used in servers than in desktop PCs, again I got the idea from somewhere that this was a really good chip for audio processing, particularly where the machine is not going to be used for much else. So I don't know what "integrated" sound and video capability came with the machine, and when cousin said "two screens, get a discrete graphics card" - now I probably understood this to mean the integrated video capability worked one screen, and the discrete video card worked the other, but I can see now, knowing a bit more about it, that he was probably just saying if I wanted two screens I needed a better video card that what came with the machine, and that both screens would be run from that better, discrete video card. It's an nVidia Quadro 600.
My original thought was that I was expecting to see two video cards in Device Manager, rather than one.
I can see that the driver date for it is April 2012, so I can easily enough hook the computer up to the web via a USB wifi dongle (the machine doesn't have wifi - see the "server" thing) that I have and that I use to update Reaper etc. and get a newer driver, which I'm sure exists by now.
https://www.cnet.com/products/nvidia-qu ... -600-1-gb/
And from that page:
So that all matches. Problem then becomes that with the second screen being more or less permanently on the lounge table while I'm WFH, I don't really know if upgrading the driver will have done anything as the machine always fires up.
The other thing is that, with two screens, I never really watch it fire up - my studio is in the corridor, so I flick the switch on the way to somewhere else and come back in a minute and it's, apparently, not working. But I do have the impression that stuff actually happens on the smaller DVI connected screen, which was on the left, and probably thus regarded as Screen 1 by Windows, but then "nothing" and so who knows. But Screen 1 is not the main screen, Screen 2 is...
When I do put the second screen back - and maybe it's time I just bought a matching new big screen seeing I'm not going back into the office any time soon - it will be on the right, and obviously I'll reconfigure the screen layout in Windows so the mouse works in a logical fashion and it will become Screen 2 - so that will prove it one way or the other, I guess.
Now that I'm in detective mode.... lookee here - if this isn't EXACTLY the same thing that's happening to me... (apart from using VGA adapters)
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/fo ... r-problem/
NVIDIA never replied and the query is 5 years old - sort of makes sense.
and, similar and 8 years old (and still unanswered!) https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/fo ... -monitors/
And there's just a bunch more similar questions on different forums, saying roughly the same thing... the
DVI montor works, the DP doesn't when they're both connected, and all is fine on reboot... https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads ... m.2350097/
Looks like I'd better update that driver and see what happens next time I get the second monitor in...
The single monitor now connected is Display Port, so clearly it's an issue when Display Port is used in addition to DVI.
But, here's where it gets tricky - the CPU in this machine is a Xeon - I believe at the time more used in servers than in desktop PCs, again I got the idea from somewhere that this was a really good chip for audio processing, particularly where the machine is not going to be used for much else. So I don't know what "integrated" sound and video capability came with the machine, and when cousin said "two screens, get a discrete graphics card" - now I probably understood this to mean the integrated video capability worked one screen, and the discrete video card worked the other, but I can see now, knowing a bit more about it, that he was probably just saying if I wanted two screens I needed a better video card that what came with the machine, and that both screens would be run from that better, discrete video card. It's an nVidia Quadro 600.
My original thought was that I was expecting to see two video cards in Device Manager, rather than one.
I can see that the driver date for it is April 2012, so I can easily enough hook the computer up to the web via a USB wifi dongle (the machine doesn't have wifi - see the "server" thing) that I have and that I use to update Reaper etc. and get a newer driver, which I'm sure exists by now.
https://www.cnet.com/products/nvidia-qu ... -600-1-gb/
And from that page:
So that all matches. Problem then becomes that with the second screen being more or less permanently on the lounge table while I'm WFH, I don't really know if upgrading the driver will have done anything as the machine always fires up.
The other thing is that, with two screens, I never really watch it fire up - my studio is in the corridor, so I flick the switch on the way to somewhere else and come back in a minute and it's, apparently, not working. But I do have the impression that stuff actually happens on the smaller DVI connected screen, which was on the left, and probably thus regarded as Screen 1 by Windows, but then "nothing" and so who knows. But Screen 1 is not the main screen, Screen 2 is...
When I do put the second screen back - and maybe it's time I just bought a matching new big screen seeing I'm not going back into the office any time soon - it will be on the right, and obviously I'll reconfigure the screen layout in Windows so the mouse works in a logical fashion and it will become Screen 2 - so that will prove it one way or the other, I guess.
Now that I'm in detective mode.... lookee here - if this isn't EXACTLY the same thing that's happening to me... (apart from using VGA adapters)
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/fo ... r-problem/
NVIDIA never replied and the query is 5 years old - sort of makes sense.
and, similar and 8 years old (and still unanswered!) https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/fo ... -monitors/
And there's just a bunch more similar questions on different forums, saying roughly the same thing... the
DVI montor works, the DP doesn't when they're both connected, and all is fine on reboot... https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads ... m.2350097/
Looks like I'd better update that driver and see what happens next time I get the second monitor in...
The single monitor now connected is Display Port, so clearly it's an issue when Display Port is used in addition to DVI.
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Re: Riddle me this???
LOL - just updated the driver via Device Manager and it got to a 2013 version... super modern 
- but if I go look up on the NVidia site there's a 2018 version which seems to be a composite or multi-card version which perhaps Device Manager can't find. I'll drop the file on the machine somewhere and maybe install it at another time and see what happens...
- but if I go look up on the NVidia site there's a 2018 version which seems to be a composite or multi-card version which perhaps Device Manager can't find. I'll drop the file on the machine somewhere and maybe install it at another time and see what happens...