Monitor Is Black And Says Out Of Range

Q: My daughter tried to set her resolution on her Windows XP Pro desktop to the next highest resolution. When she did this the screen went black and when we reboot it gave us a message that said “out of range” and the screen remains black. How do we get her screen back to normal?

A: It seems that your daughter’s computer supports a higher refresh rate than the monitor is able to display. Refresh rate is simply a way of measuring how many times images are displayed by a computer monitor within a certain amount of time. Microsoft describes the problem and solution in an article entitled
New Monitor Shows Garbled Display or a ‘Signal Out of Range’ Error Message When Computer Starts.

You need to boot your daughter’s desktop into Safe Mode by pressing F8 as the computer starts. You then need to adjust the refresh rate to default by right clicking on the desktop background then click on Properties -> Settings -> Advanced -> Adapter -> Adapter Default. Then click Okay -> Okay -> Yes. Your daughter’s computer should then restart. If you still cannot use the monitor, you may need to boot back into Safe Mode and reset the video adapter to Standard Display Adapter (VGA) following the directions in the Microsoft article.