One year ago I decided to switch from Windows XP to Windows 7. I had a 17" CRT monitor with a screen resolution of 1600x1200 which worked fine on Windows XP. While installing Windows 7 everything went well until Windows 7 was going to install the video card its driver. Windows 7 puts the screen to its recommended resolution and my screen became black. I waited a few minutes to be sure the installation was finished. I turned off the computer by hand and restarted the computer on a resolution of 800x640.

When windows 7 was done installing I went to screen resolutions and the resolution of 1600x1200 was on the top of the list with '(recommended)' next to it. I tried putting it on 1600x1200 but again my screen went black.

I installed all windows 7 updates including the video card driver from the NVidia site (NOT from Windows 7). I tried about everything to make it work on 1600x1200 but with no succes. The highest resolution I got with the crt monitor was 1280x1024.

I had a TFT screen which had 1280x1024 as max resolution and had better colors, so I used that one till today.

My video card is 9600GT and my power supply is beyond sufficient.

I even tried to install the driver I had on XP to see if it worked, but no results. I tried classic mode on windows 7, changed the dpi, the frequentie and the monitor settings, but nothing worked.

I really like a vertical resolution of 1200, but it seems today I'm bound to all those standard monitors with a resolution of 1980x1024...

Can anybody explain to me what the cause is that it worked on Windows XP but not on Windows 7? And maybe a solution to the problem (I actually gave up on getting it fixed...)

Thanks a lot in advance.

SOLUTION

I downloaded the according monitor driver and installed it. Next I rebooted my computer on low resolution (800x640) and connected the CRT monitor. When Windows 7 booted successfully I went to computer management and 'update the driver' of my monitor. I manually selected 'Generic PnP monitor' and made that one active. I want to advanced settings at 'Screen resolution' and selected the mode '1600x1200 (32-bit) 80 Hertz (95 Hertz did not work). Now I had my resolution on 1600x1200. I repeated the earlier step to select the original monitor again instead of the Generic monitor.

Quite a way to solve this problem, but it worked! Thanks a lot you all.