How to completely remove strobelight effects?

[uninstallPlease]

Hi ToastyX

I've tried the strobelight utility and it used to work for a time, until I'd switch my monitor combo around...

Now, I've got two monitors: a 60 Hz monitor and a VG248QE, the latter I had used strobelight on.

Now somehow, I guess I must have misclicked at some point, I have installed strobelight stuff for the 60 Hz monitor, and whenever I boot, my Monitor says "unsupported refresh rate".

After a while, Windows will only activate the second monitor, then I log in, both monitor switch on for a second, then it goes back to only one monitor.

When I go to the screen resolution dialogue, and click on identify, the second display will come to life, when I click on identify again, it'll go dark again.

When I start strobelight-setup, it'll momentarily enable the second display only to go away again, I can then see both monitors in the list of strobelight-setup. I select the monitor where I want the resolution gone, ( it doesn't say active since the monitor has been disabled again by that point) and I click on "Reset this display", click okay, restart the computer: No change, it still says unsupported resolution etc

I've also tried going into the device manager and manually uninstalling all displays, enabling "hidden devices" and getting rid of those monitors too, I've used procmon to see that the tool writes to HKLM/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Enuim/Display and saw that the entry for that monitor disappears once I uninstall it.

But still... it acts up. What can I do to completely eradicate all changes strobelight made without having to reinstall Windows?

[ToastyX]

(11-02-2014 01:50 PM)uninstallPlease Wrote:  I've also tried going into the device manager and manually uninstalling all displays, enabling "hidden devices" and getting rid of those monitors too, I've used procmon to see that the tool writes to HKLM/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Enuim/Display and saw that the entry for that monitor disappears once I uninstall it.

That's all strobelight-setup.exe does. If the monitor entry is removed, it's completely removed.

This seems more like a video driver issue, not something Strobelight did. It sounds like the second monitor is disabled in the driver for some reason. Check the video card's control panel to see if you can enable the second monitor. If not, the driver might have gotten confused when the EDID override was installed and you switched the monitors around. If you have an NVIDIA card, try reinstalling the video driver with the clean install option. You can also try completely uninstalling the video driver using this: http://www.wagnardmobile.com/DDU/

[uninstallPlease]

Oh, I can enable the second monitor, all I need to do is click "Identify" in the screen resolution panel, it's just that when I press it again, it gets disabled again... so Identify now works as a toggle, it also makes the monitor disappear from the preview, not disabled.

I just noticed that the issue started appearing after I was playing around with strobelight again.

Thanks, I'll try reinstalling the video driver tomorrow.

[uninstallPlease]

So.. I have unintalled the driver, restarted my computer, Windows was using an awful resolution and my second monitor was still blinking, i.e. bad refresh rate.
Since I saw that the nvidia driver had been swiftly reinstalled, I tried the tool you suggested. It wanted me to boot into safe mode, so that it did.

However, Safe Mode only powered on the primary display, which is the monitor which gets assigned the wrong refresh rate by default, so I ended up having to reset my computer. Windows would boot NOT into safe mode, the display driver remover started and removed everything happily or so I think.. I rebooted again and still my monitor uses the wrong refresh rate by default. This has *never* happened before playing around with strobelight that fateful day in over half a year since I have this new computer or on any previous system I've used that monitor with.

Reinstalling the nvidia drivers haven't changed anything either.

So what options do I have? Where could this setting persist?

I've ruled out the monitor being at fault since it works flawlessly on my Notebook. Also, I've used the cable I use to connect it to my notebook and connected it to my PC instead, no change.

Even weirder, why does my video card insist on using the wrong refresh rate even in BIOS or UEFI or w/e? Any ideas? I'd be glad to get this running again.

[ToastyX]

(11-03-2014 05:35 PM)uninstallPlease Wrote:  However, Safe Mode only powered on the primary display, which is the monitor which gets assigned the wrong refresh rate by default, so I ended up having to reset my computer. Windows would boot NOT into safe mode, the display driver remover started and removed everything happily or so I think..

The refresh rate shouldn't be wrong in safe mode. You could try disconnecting the monitor to make it use the other monitor. I would advise running DDU in safe mode to make sure it can remove everything.

(11-03-2014 05:35 PM)uninstallPlease Wrote:  I rebooted again and still my monitor uses the wrong refresh rate by default. This has *never* happened before playing around with strobelight that fateful day in over half a year since I have this new computer or on any previous system I've used that monitor with.

This is not a Strobelight issue. The problem you're describing is not possible without a third-party issue being involved. What refresh rate is it using? If this were a refresh rate issue, simply setting the correct refresh rate would resolve the problem.

(11-03-2014 05:35 PM)uninstallPlease Wrote:  Reinstalling the nvidia drivers haven't changed anything either.

Did you use the clean install option? Reinstalling the driver won't remove the settings without that option, but DDU should have taken care of that anyway.

(11-03-2014 05:35 PM)uninstallPlease Wrote:  So what options do I have? Where could this setting persist?

There is nothing else left to persist. The only thing I can think of is maybe the video card is stuck in a confused state, which shouldn't be possible, but I've heard of DVI ports getting disabled with buggy NVIDIA driver updates. If the video card is somehow remembering the monitor, try connecting the other monitor to that port to "reset" it.

[uninstallPlease]

YESSSS my beauty works again.

I couldn't see the refresh rate because my HP LP3065 doesn't have any kind of OSD, and it would only tell me that the refresh rate/resolution/we was wrong while in BIOS or while windows was booting, afterwards it would automatically disable the screen.

So... I had tried hooking up my second monitor via DVI as the only monitor, but that didn't help either. I then proceeded to let that one be the only monitor to be hooked up, ran DDU again, this time in safe mode, it rebooted, everything was blurry looking of course. I tried connecting the HP in the other monitor's stead... didn't work, still wrong refresh rate or w/e, connected the other monitor again, and connected the HP as a secondary monitor, but ofc Windows didn't recognize it then without any drivers.

Then I thought... what about I disconnect the HP from power, I had never thought of trying that... So I cut the power of the HP a few times, I shut the computer down, reconnected the HP as the only monitor, booted my computer, and BAM, the BIOS would be displayed on the HP in all its pixelated glory, whereas previously I only got a blinking error light from my monitor. Then, I booted into Windows, hit the "detect" display button a few times (recall: It used to *toggle* the conection of the HP, not merely disable it, Windows wouldn't see it at all), nothing happened, i.e. great! I rebotted again with my second monitor hooked up via DP as before, did the "Detect" check again, still working. Awesome! No more sporadic display losses on the HP now, it used to get disconnected when starting games, when the UAC showed up, or whenever a device search was triggered for some random reason.

So I guess I changed two things at once, switched the power off completely of the HP and removed the drivers in safe mode, so I won't know what it was, but I'm glad it's back to normal!

Thanks for your support. Does it even make sense that the drivers can affect the video card in a way even when the BIOS is shown?

[uninstallPlease]

Hi Toasty

I've re-enabled Strobelight and paid very close attention to only installing refresh rates with the 144Hz monitor, and the problem has still reappeared :/

So I guess I can confirm that Strobelight is in fact the cause for this behaviour.

[ToastyX]

If an EDID override can cause that to happen, then it's an NVIDIA driver bug. An override for one monitor should not be able to affect the other monitor, and the problem should not persist after removing the override.

Just to make sure this isn't a strobelight-setup.exe bug, use Custom Resolution Utility to check what overrides are installed. The VG248 should have ** next to it in the monitor list when the refresh rates are installed, while the HP should not. The HP should show 2560x1600 @ 60 Hz (or something like 59.971 Hz) as the first detailed resolution. If that's the case, there's no reason for the HP to stop working. Both monitors should show "(active)" if they are enabled.

Resetting the VG248 with strobelight-setup.exe and rebooting should remove the **. Running the reset-all.exe program that comes with CRU and rebooting should remove all overrides.

(11-09-2014 04:09 PM)uninstallPlease Wrote:  Does it even make sense that the drivers can affect the video card in a way even when the BIOS is shown?

That can only happen if the video card can remember the monitor somehow, which might be possible with NVIDIA cards. I haven't heard of that happening with AMD/ATI cards.

[uninstallPlease]

Hi Toasty, thanks for the reply!

Here's a screenshot from the CRU's monitor selection dropdown:




At some point in the past, I was able to use Strobelight on my ASUS while having the HP one connected without issues, I'm now trying to get back to that setup if possible.

I'll keep you posted.

[falkentyne]

(11-19-2014 05:12 PM)uninstallPlease Wrote:  Hi Toasty, thanks for the reply!

Here's a screenshot from the CRU's monitor selection dropdown:




At some point in the past, I was able to use Strobelight on my ASUS while having the HP one connected without issues, I'm now trying to get back to that setup if possible.

I'll keep you posted.

You have three entries for the VG248, two with a different ID than the top one, then the two under that are identical ID's, then three entries for the HP.

Maybe run reset-all, then the toastyx driver restarter, and reconfigure everything from scratch?