missing display resolutions

[steve3000]

After resetting the NVRAM. Both of my monitors now default to 800x600 resolution/millions of colors which is much lower than it used to be. In the display preferences no other resolution or button to detect monitor is available. Both the viewsonic E90 and Dell E151FP used to be set at a much higher resolution, something like 1200x900, though I can't remember exactly.

I have tried restarting numerous times with one or both monitors off and on with no luck.

Strangley also, when I use Avid Xpress editing software, the 2nd monitor displays the video full screen (and folders and timeline if I put stuff there) whereas it used to be just additional desktop space.

How can I change the display preferences to a higher resolution when it now does not offer any options?

Thanks for your help.

[kbear]

Do these displays have USB cables? If so, unplug and reset.

Try opening the Display pref while holding down the Option key to see if you get anything extra.

Did these monitors have any software that may need to be reinstalled?

If nothing helps you can dump the pref and get a new default:

From Apple:

Warning: This section involves use of the "rm" command. Be sure to type the commands exactly. Typographical error when using the rm command could result in severe data loss, up to and including all information on the computer. To verify characters and spacing, you may copy and paste the text from your web browser into a text editor, such as TextEdit.

1. Start up in single user mode by pressing and holding the Command-S key combination when you turn on the computer.
2. At the prompt, type: mount -uw /
3. Press Return.
4. Type: rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist
5. Press Return.
6. Type: reboot
7. Press Return.


When the computer restarts the preference is recreated with default settings.

Or you could dump the system prefs but that would mean resetting a lot of stuff.