In mid-November, a weird thing happened to my home desktop PC. In the past, the 2nd monitor would not register or display if I had been resuming from standby on and off for a few days. A quick reboot always solved the problem. This time, however, two consecutive reboots did not solve the problem.
I did a little troubleshooting, but it seemed i could not get a picture out of one of the DVI ports on my EVGA Nvidia video card. I took a shot and called them around 11pm. And someone picked up! I had to hang up, register the video card online, then call back. After a short bout of troubleshooting with EVGA technical support, the rep suggested I send the card back to them for replacement. This could take about two weeks for me to send them my card, and then have them mail me a replacement.
To avoid being inconvenienced by a lack of video, I opted for their cross-ship program. I’d pay $310 upfront, and EVGA wold ship a replacement card. Once I received and installed the new card, I could ship the old card back, and EVGA would refund my $310 back to me. It took a few days, but the new card finally arrived.
Imagine my surprise when I installed the new card and experienced the same problem, I was befuddled. There was no way this was a hardware problem, and I had the latest drivers. I called EVGA technical support, and surprisingly spoke to the same rep as last time. This time around, after performing the same test steps, the rep suggested that I roll back my graphics drivers to an earlier version from April 2012. However, I had to make sure I selected the ‘Clean Installation’ option, which would delete any old installed driver code.
And it worked!
I mailed the original video card back to CA last Tuesday, and I hope they refund my money fairly soon, and I’d like to put this little chapter behind me. I was glad that EVGA offers nearly around-the-clock technical support, and the cross-ship option is very handy, because it cuts down on down time. Still, I was surprised (and embarrassed) that I didn’t think of rolling back to an earlier video driver, but a little annoyed that the technical support rep didn’t think of it either. I had to pay $17 out of pocket to ship back the video card to the EVGA offices in California.
Lesson learned — think about doing more troubleshooting on my own, including trying out earlier drivers.