what's wrong with my monitor?

[scarshapedstar]

I'm using a NEC Multisync FE950+. Should be nice, but...

for some time now, it's had this problem. There are many, many little horizontal bands that appear, only a few millimeters wide, and they are pretty uniform... over the entire screen. They take up roughly half of the viewing area. What am I talking about? Well, for example, this white background appears to have a bunch of little gray stripes - these bands are darker than the rest of the screen. They distort shapes as well - text in the bands looks italicized, and scroll bars appear to have little divots in them. The higher resolution, the smaller and more numerous these little bands become. Oh, and they shift slightly up and down numerous times each second. Also, every few minutes there's a "tearing" effect where I can see the screen refresh.

As you can probably imagine, this sucks. My guess is that something is wrong with the inner workings of the CRT; some sort of problem with the photon gun thingy that causes certain horizontals to be darker than the rest. This effect is visible during startup, so I'm pretty sure it's not a software problem. It does get worse at times, namely after I hit escape in the Half-Life server browser, but maybe that's just some really weird coincidence.

I thought I could try to fix this with the advanced geometry settings in Powerstrip, but quickly realized I had no idea what I was doing and would probably destroy the damn thing.

So is my monitor screwed?

[radio1_mike]

New monitor or old monitor?

Did this just start?

Correct drivers?

Refresh rates?


Anyone else? Say, is the Multisync, a trinitron-tube based monitor. Trinitron-based monitors do have fine grey wires holding the apeture grill up, if I am not mistaken?

[JPMiller]

This is an excellent article on CRT monitor tweaking and may help...probably not though because your problem does not sound like the typical degauss moire issue that the majority of problems deal with.
http://www.maximumpc.com/reprints/re...003-05-21.html
Do you have your speakers close or next to your monitor?

[nurdonsite2]

did u try another moniter? or anoteher video card? it might be a video card problem but im not sure.

[JPMiller]

Good call nurdonsite2........
swap out vid card if you can....power chord on monitor if you can, and monitor itself if possible.....hope you got a friend or spares!

[skybolt_1]

I had that problem happen to an old TNT2 card - same basic thing that you are describing. There was tons of tearing and grey stripes running horizontally through the monitor. The weird part was that it wouldn't happen when I was doing Glide based stuff AKA Half-Life.

I solved the problem by swapping out the video card.

skybolt_1

[DoctorReno]

Sounds like a video card issue to me. Does this occur at low resolution say... 800 x 600? You might try going into your settings and lowering the graphic accelerator to see if it clears up the problem.

Radio1: I have the Multisync also...love it! It is not a Trinitron and I am pretty sure it is a shadow mask . But you are correct in part about the damper wires. All aperture grill monitors have the (wires) reinforcing the aperture grill.

[radio1_mike]

It was a shot in the dark.