System suddenly switched to default display driver

lordsnake

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Sep 25, 2009
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One of my pc's today just randomly changed to a low resolution, and the previous resolution options have vanished.
Under device manager, it still shows my ATI GX card as the display driver, however if I select the monitor (LG 29UB65 Ultrawide) properties or desktop display properties, then it says it us using Microsoft Default Display Driver and not my ATI card.
I cannot see any way to tell it to use the ATI card. I have uninstalled the ATI driver and the monitor driver, reinstalled, let Windows detect them, rebooted etc, but nothing.

There have been no hardware changes on the PC, it is the same today as it was yesterday or 6 months ago.

Any ideas?
 
I had this exact same problem happen to me yesterday. Completely out of the blue!

I have an older HP Pavilion 9270f with an ATI Radeon HD 4600 card, two monitors. Yesterday, it blinked and when it came back 5 seconds later, I had one monitor (mirrored on the other) at lower resolution. My ATI card is still there, but it is using the Microsoft Default Display driver and I can't find any drivers online for it.

I updated Windows to the Fall Creators edition or whatever and it fixed it for about 2 minutes, then the same problem occurred. I'm stumped.
 
This rather looks like a Windows update is the cause.



 


I ran Windows Update after experiencing the issue, hoping it might fix things. It did, but the fix only lasted for about 2 minutes. I'm still searching for an actual solution.
 
ok, so I went into device drivers, uninstalled and deleted the files for my ATI card, then scanned for hardware changes, and it fixed it this time. Prior to the reinstall this method did not work, not it has stayed for a few hours so far.