Heavy drop shadows/ghosting on Windows 10 on a HP Pavilion 27xw monitor: SOLVED

[JoJetSki]

On Windows 10 64bit running on an HP HP EliteDesk 800 G2 SFF using the VGA port connected to an HP Pavilion 27xw I was experiencing what I would call serios drop shadows.  What I mean by that is the light text behind the black text on the screen.  However the light grey image is about a one quarter inch offset to the point if you see the letter "r" in black you would see the letter "r" in light grey next to the black "r" not lightly offset like a drop shadow would be.  In addition ALL icons images etc on the screen had a light drop shadow in the same placement.  When you started the OS and saw the circle of dots while you are waiting for the OS to start I would see a ghosted version of the dots about one quarter of an inch over.

My point is, even if you described this as what is traditionally called a drop shadow it is much more extreme and applies to everything on the screen.  In addition, it basically makes the screen look blury because as you can image a ghost image of the entire screen in a light grey next to all the icons and text and really look bad.

I googled around and found the settings in the control panel to disable drop shadows and that did not help.  I went into the corresponding registry entries to make sure they were set correctly and they were.

If I left the monitor turned off when I went home (as opposed to letting it go into a sleep/low power mode) they seemed to disapper for a bit when I got into work but they they would come back over the day.  I have 4 of these HP Pavilion 27xw monitors so I swapped out mine with another computer (HP Elitedesk 8100 sff) that was not exhibiting the same behavor and the new monitor had the same problem and the old monitor didn't exhibit the problem on the old computer.

The Pavilion 27xw has two HDMI ports in addition to the VGA port but the default behavior of using the HDMI port with Windows 10 is that when the monitor goes to sleep it interperuts that as the cable being disconnected and then the computer will resize all windows and move them to the upper left hand corner because if you truly were attaching a new monitor it wants to make sure you don't lose any windows on a smaller screen.  There are registry changes to get around this problem but then you do lose the functionality of hooking up a new monitor in an emergency and not having your desktop resized as it should be.

Being that the "old" monitor worked fine on other computers that means it is not the monitor.  I was considering buying a new video card as my video drivers were up to date and the issue was still happening.  I finally swapped out the VGA cable (which is the one HP supplied with the monitor) for a more heavily shielded cable and viola the drop shadow/image ghosting problem is gone.

I am writing this for any one who is seeing these same symptons and changing Windows 10 to get rid of the drop shadow is not fixing your problem possibly you just need a better shielded cable.  I am also writing this to point out even using ALL hp equipment and cables can cause a problem and putting in a better cable may fix your problem.  Obviously this could have happened just as easily on a Dell or any other computer with a thinly shielded cable.

Hope this helps someone.

JoJetSki