Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Saturday 28 August 2010

More Dell Fail (Or Maybe NVidia)

I bought a Dell ST2410 monitor for my new home computer (a Dell XPS 8100 shipped with an NVidia GTX260 graphics card, which has two DVI ports). Dell shipped a VGA cable and a DVI-VGA converter, so I thought I'd go out and buy a digital connector. Dell shipped me a DVI-HDMI converter dongle (made by NVidia apparently), the Dell monitor has HDMI and my TV has HDMI so I thought I'd get an HDMI cable and this would be easy. Wrong. The monitor completely fails to detect any signal from the computer. I tried everything I can think of. Even my old Macbook Pro can drive the monitor through its DVI port, the DVI-HDMI dongle and the HDMI cable. So apart from the cable, which obviously works, we have here three parts all shipped by Dell that don't work together. Sigh. I guess I'll try a DVI cable next...



Comments

Doktor Insano
You should have went with Mac again ;)
What operating system do you use? Windows or any Linux distro?
Robert O'Callahan
I've got Windows 7 and Fedora 13 dual-booting. It's not likely to be a driver issue, since I can't even get boot-up text mode to display on the screen.
DigDug
Heh. I've had the exact same problems with a Samsung monitor and a 13" Macbook. 3 trips to Best Buy to buy 3 different cables and 3 different adaptors later I found out that Mini-DP -> DVI -> HDMI will somehow let everything talk to one another. And digging through Apple support all I found was that "it must be a problem with the monitor". That's compared to my VAIO which has HDMI and VGA out and works with a plain old cable.
Anyway, there's headaches no matter which side of the fence you sit on... that is, unless you give all of your money to one company. Then things typically "just work".
voracity
Don't blame Dell or nVidia. Blame HDMI. I've had no end of trouble with HDMI cables and devices...
Mic
OFFTOPIC: sorry, couldn't find any contact information quickly, so I hope you don't mind that I post here:
The overview page is 'broken' in Firefox 3.6.8 in the way that the lines between blog entries extend into the right bar with the calendar and older dates. It's hidden (most likely behind a background?) when you hover the calendar column though.
I thought you might be interested.
regards, Mic