Screen Corruption Problems

[omalleytrading]

Hey Guys & Gals,

I'm having a really odd problem with one of my PC's lately. It will run fine for a while, then I start seeing some corruption on the screen -- windows don't draw properly, the cursor isn't painted, everything slows way down.

When I reboot, it's like the computer forgets what my video settings are -- I'm dumped back to standard VGA mode. Sometimes the graphics card and monitor are still known, and I can just reset the screen resolution and color depth. Other times, it's like it lost the configuration for the card, and I have to reinstall drivers.

Any clue what could be causing this?

[Dax_Brandy]

have you tried other video card? how about the drivers for the video card? are they up-to-date?

[omalleytrading]

Swapping in a new graphics card isn't the easiest option -- I don't have them lying around.

I have downloaded the latest driver for both the card and the monitor, however -- but that doesn't seem to help.

Virus scan shows nothing.

Spybot scan shows nothing.

Ad-aware scan shows nothing.

[kranich]

If you downloaded and reinstalled drivers then it seems to me that the video card (or on board video) is acting up. I would move to replace it.

[omalleytrading]

Ugh. That's what I'm afraid of. This is an older PC (PIII, 866Mhz) and I'm trying to ride it into the ground. If I have to do any major work to it, it's almost worth replacing it. I had hoped to avoid that...

[Bovon]

Yeah...crap happens. I have an old TNT Nvidia laying around here someplace (can't ever find it when the notion to crap-can it hits me in a cleanup mode) that the on-card RAM started flaking out.. at first, it was just crappy video but a reboot would fix it (for awhile) Then I began getting shadow like lines across the page with text etc.

While in the trouble shooting mode, I downloaded all of the various Nvidia drivers (and the uninstaller) I could find. 7 to 10 mb on dialup will try your patience...especially when a new card fixed the problem.

[omalleytrading]

Well, I finally replaced the graphics card on the PC in question (GeForce 256) with another one I had lying around (TNT2 Ultra 64), and all seems to be well again.

Thanks for the help everyone...