pc monitor going crazy

krishna

For the last week, the computer has taken ages to boot up. Stops for a while when it gets to loading the antivirus package (eset). Today, the screen has started to blink every so often. i.e. screen goes black and then comes back again. This is not related to the screen saver. At the same time, I am getting some black pixels appearing on the screen in various places, and a white line with red zig-zag over part of the menu. If I minimise and then restore/maximise, the screen goes back to normal for a while. Is this the graphics card, or something else? The hard drive is fairly new. I replaced it a few months ago when the old windows installation started to get really slow.

Giant_Space_Lizard

have you checked the monitor cables are plugged in securely?

krishna

All cables securely plugged in. Finally got a blue screen referring to nc4_disp which is the driver for the video card. Strange thing is I have two installations of windows on separate hard drives (old one is XP home, new is XP Pro) and both were causing a problem, though the newer one is worse.Just downloaded and installed the latest driver from the nVidia website, so let's see if that works.

Giant_Space_Lizard

well it does sound a lot like gpu artifacting, also if the new drivers dont make a difference maybe try an earlier version.

Do you have windows update set to auto? maybe the auto update of drivers caused the problem? highly unlikely but possible

krishna

Windows update is set to auto, but looks like it was the video driver. Downloaded new driver from nvidia website. Also seems to have a lot of added features, in terms of colour adjustment, screen resolution, display quality vs performance, which is quite nice.

Still have this long pause on startup though. Everything seems to seize up for a couple of minutes when it loads nod32 a-v. Even the clock stops.

Giant_Space_Lizard

long pause sound like there is a lot of programs for it to load on startup

you can go to run and type msconfig, this will let you have a look at and disable if not required any programs that are set to start up when the pc is turned on

glad to hear the graphics problems are taken care of though