The Dell 0636U monitor

Notes from troubleshooting why this monitor sucks so much, prior to resolution.

Monitor was part of a rack-mount drawer system, very nice with a tiny keyboard and trackball and hinge that allows the LCD screen to be stowed flat.

When hooking up the monitor to a PC, I get a blue screen with a red box containing a flashing message along the lines of "Invalid PC Mode H:48Khz V:10Hz"

Googling this, there are hundreds of hits, each with a slightly different wrong mode indicated. By and large they are almost all from souls attempting to get this monitor working with a Linux box of one flavor or another. The most informative results for Windows based inquiries were:

This "majorgeeks" forum http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=52316 where it was pointed out that the refresh rate being output by the graphics card might need to be adjusted, although it suggested 75Hz,

A single-page PDF of a service manual for the monitor http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/monitors/fprack/En/trouble.pdf mentions the exact problem but unhelpfully refers to a "Support Timing Table" that I have not been able to find.

This Dell forum http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2004-August/015998.html, reproduced endlessly throughout Dell's web site like a great echo chamber, where a guy asks for the specs on the stupid monitor and a link to a Dell manual is given.

The Dell manual, http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/acc/4292e/ is a 5-part website that disturbingly lists a different model number for the monitor under the monitor specs, along with crazy looking screen and refresh rate specs, but under Tech Notes it states that the resolution is 1024 x 768 with a rate of 72Hz.

This correlates somewhat with one of the other hits for the monitor, a surplus dealer that lists it as a 1024 x 768 monitor. Interestingly, yet another surplus dealer lists it as an "XVGA" monitor. What's XVGA?

My PC has a Quadro2 EX graphics card, which does not support 72Hz. A spec for the Quadro2 EX can be found at page 28 of this spec for an HP tower http://www.ctmsolutions.com/download/postproduction/HP_CPUHPW8000_specif_US.pdf . Nvidia's website seems completely useless and I was unable to dig refresh rate specs out of it for any card. The GeForce 4 from the same tower spec seems to support 72Hz.

One of my other Dells has a spare GeForce FX 5200 video card, as seen here http://www.techexcess.net/nvidia-geforce-fx-5200-128mb-video-card-8x-agp-dell-g0170-f1810.aspx, but it does not support the 72Hz