Dell Ultrasharp Monitor too bright?

Most Dell customers are calling Dell Technical support complaining that their monitors are too bright, even though the monitor's brightness settings are set to zero. And even if the technical support would replace the monitor, still same issue.

I've tested Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP, one thing I do noticed is, since it's ultrasharp, the picture is really crisp and yes, bright.

I've tried to see it for myself. Here's the specs of the computer I used.

MSI GX620.

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo P8400

Memory: 4GB DDR2, 800

Video Card: Nvidia 9600MGT

OS: Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit

The results. The monitor's brightness settings are set to zero, and still it's too bright.

The thing that i found is, most video cards are not designed for ultrasharp monitors, so technically the brightness settings of the video card is set to 50%.

I tried to lower the video card brightness settings to zero then adjusted the brightness settings of the monitor to my preferred settings, then viola, everything's pleasurable to my eyes.

All video cards have independent brightness settings.

For Nvidia you can access the Nvidia controll panel

For ATI you can access the Catalyst Control Center

For Intel you can access the display settings.

Hope these would help you. Because replacing the monitor won't fix the issue, since the monitor is working as designed.

A Quick Look at ATI 5870

The battle continues between ATI and NVIDIA.

With Nvidia's GTX 295, ATI's 4870x2 was far left behind gaming graphics card market.

ATI's big come back? Sept. 23, 2009.

I know my blog is a bit late. kindda busy at work. But anyways, i was able to get my hands on this monster card. and I can say, as soon as ATI would release the x2 version of this monster. Nvidia's GTX295 will be eaten alive. But I don't think Nvidia would give the crown that easy.

I saw in other forums that Nvidia is now developing their 300 series video cards.

Here's the quick peek on ATI's 5870 features and specifications.

• Get unrivalled visual quality and intense gaming performance and for today and tomorrow with support for Microsoft® DirectX® 11
• With ATI Eyefinity technology get the ultimate immersive gaming experience innovative ‘wrap around’ multi-display capabilities
• Tap into the massive parallel processing power of your GPU with ATI Stream technology and tackle demanding tasks like video transcoding with incredible speed
• Feel the brute strength of more than 2 teraFLOPS plowing through the most demanding games
• Experience the speed, responsiveness and performance of ultra-high bandwidth GDDR5 memory
• ATI CrossFireX™ technology with multi-GPU support offers advanced scalability

• 2.15 billion 40nm transistors
• TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
  • 1600 Stream Processing Units
  • 80 Texture Units
  • 128 Z/Stencil ROP Units
  • 32 Color ROP Units
• GDDR5 interface with 153.6 GB/sec of memory bandwidth
• PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
• DirectX® 11 support
  • Shader Model 5.0
  • DirectCompute 11
  • Programmable hardware tessellation unit
  • Accelerated multi-threading
  • HDR texture compression
  • Order-independent transparency
• OpenGL 3.2 support¹
• Image quality enhancement technology
  • Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes
  • Adaptive anti-aliasing
  • 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering
  • 128-bit floating point HDR rendering
• ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology^2,3
  • Three independent display controllers
    • Drive three displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays
  • Display grouping
    • Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display
• ATI Stream acceleration technology
  • OpenCL 1.0 compliant
  • DirectCompute 11
  • Double precision floating point processing support
  • Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling^4,5
    • Native support for common video encoding instructions
• ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology⁶
  • Dual, triple, and quad GPU scaling
  • Dual-channel bridge interconnect
• ATI Avivo HD Video & Display technology⁷
  • UVD 2 dedicated video playback accelerator
  • Advanced post-processing and scaling⁸
  • Dynamic contrast enhancement and color correction
  • Brighter whites processing (blue stretch)
  • Independent video gamma control
  • Dynamic video range control
  • Support for H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2
  • Dual-stream 1080p playback support^9,10
  • DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support
  • Integrated dual-link DVI output with HDCP¹¹
    • Max resolution: 2560x1600¹²
  • Integrated DisplayPort output
    • Max resolution: 2560x1600¹²
  • Integrated HDMI 1.3 output with Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio
    • Max resolution: 1920x1200¹²
  • Integrated VGA output
    • Max resolution: 2048x1536¹²
  • 3D stereoscopic display/glasses support¹³
  • Integrated HD audio controller
    • Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
    • Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats
• ATI PowerPlay™ power management technology⁷
  • Dynamic power management with low power idle state
  • Ultra-low power state support for multi-GPU configurations
• Certified drivers for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP

Speeds & Feeds

• Engine clock speed: 850 MHz
• Processing power (single precision): 2.72 TeraFLOPS
• Processing power (double precision): 544 GigaFLOPS
• Polygon throughput: 850M polygons/sec
• Data fetch rate (32-bit): 272 billion fetches/sec
• Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 68 Gigatexels/sec
• Pixel fill rate: 27.2 Gigapixels/sec
• Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 108.8 Gigasamples/sec
• Memory clock speed: 1.2 GHz
• Memory data rate: 4.8 Gbps
• Memory bandwidth: 153.6 GB/sec
• Maximum board power: 188 Watts
• Idle board power: 27 Watts

Windows Update Causing STOP Error 0x0000007E

Windows update KB973879 has been pulled from Windows Update and is being worked on.

For now simple system restore should fix the issue, else uninstall this update by booting to safe mode.

Issue: System blue screens either when disconnecting a USB device, using safely remove hardware or when system is resuming from standby/idle state.

Workaround: Uninstalling windows update KB973879 and hiding this update from available update is currently seem to be fixing the issue.

In case if removing update KB973879 doesn’t fix the issue, we need to remove remaining two updates KB970653 and KB972036.