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Spurious lines appearing on screen

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14 replies

by richimber

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On one of my PC client machines I am getting spurious broken lines appearing randomly within application windows, dialogue boxes and occasionally on backgrounds in windows. When you scroll up or down or refresh the screen in any way the lines tend to vanish but reappear, again in random fashion, when another window is opened.

I have tried reinstalling the graphics card drivers to no avail.

It appears to be something at a fairly low level as the varous screens through the early bootup process are unaffected but as soon as the windows screens kick in, the problem begins to rear its head.

It's not a show stopper but it is extremely irritating for the user.

The machine (an SGI 320) is running NT4 workstation and is fairly old (3 years or so). Is something just wearing out ?

14 replies

by an_it_guy

hi, its worth giving a look at the RAM on the machine. Chk to see if it is sufficient enough to live-up to all your applications. If possible, try adding some RAM with same specifications into the system & see if that helps.
Cheers.

by sfath

Try attaching a different monitor. It's possible the monitor is going bad.

by paulp

Is there anything in close proximity to the monitor which generates electro-magnetical fields such as a motor - maybe a desk fan, dimmer switch or fluorescent liht? Or perhaps unshielded speakers?

by ann777

It's probably the video card going bad.

The fact that it does not appear in DOS mode is telling me that the DOS resolution settings on the card are not affected and it's only the higher resolution settings that Windows uses that are affecting the user currently.

I suggest that you try installing another video card and see if the problems go away.

by zlitocook

Try running scandisk, defrag or nts version of it.
These do wonders for odd video problems.

by csmith

Most of the time this problem is a memory failure on the video card.
Sometimes its just excessive dust blocking the cooling of the video chip on the card.
IF it occurs only in one program, then its the screen update routine of that program.
But random? then its very likely the video card.
Change it or clean it, depending on available time.
Usually it is not the monitor, it is not the video driver, and its not a hard disk problem.
Regards, Chris

by richimber

Thanks to everybody who submitted suggestions. Before I got the chance to try any of the possible solutions, the problem disappeared and has yet to rear its head again ! If it does, I`ll work my way through this list of possibilities. Thanks again everyone.

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