For most people, buying a new screen is a simple task. Take it home, unplug the old one, plug tne new one, turn it on and there you go. For most people…

For me, it meant a whole decluttering operation*, desk cleaning, throwing away needless stuff, dusting, all sorts of things to make room for my brand new LG W53 22” monitor. I had already decided to keep my old monitor ( a 17” Philips) and use it as desktop extension, so I needed even more room.  After hours of sweating and sewaring, everything was in place and I only needed to push a couple of power buttons. Imagine my disapointment when the only thing I could see on the screen was black… Now really… I already knew that I could connect the LG through D-Sub connection and it would work fine, but I wanted to use DVI. I am not even sure that the picture quality is better with DVI, but I just could not settle for D-Sub.

I called a friend of mine, who said that he never had problems with his DVI screen. He thought that maybe there was a setting on my screen that I should change in order to force DVI input, and proposed the all time classic: RTFM. As you can imagine, the problem was not solved, so I started searching for a solution on the vast depths of the internet. It turns out that it is a common problem, affecting various combinations of screens and graphic cards, with no pattern of appearance. The solution that some people had tried and the one that worked for me was the following:

My radeon has two DVI outputs. I plugged the DVI cable to the main one, plugged the other end on the monitor. Then I plugged a D-Sub cable on the secondary output (with the use of an adapter) and plugged it on the D-Sub input of the monitor. So, I had the monitor connected to the PC with both cables at the same time. When I turned on the monitor, it first received analog signal (the OSD read “D-Sub”) but switched soon to digital. I disconnected the D-Sub cable and the monitor loched on digital signal. That was it. I have absolutelly no fucking idea why this was necessary, but it worked, so I don’t care.

In case you have the same problem, give this solution a shot. For some people it has all that was needed, for some others it only solved the problem temporairily, for others it did not work. But you never know…