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Video Problems

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14 replies

by thecomputerguy74

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I have a user who has an ATI Rage IIc Video card. When rebooting the PC, the background is black and the icons and text set to large. If you go into display settings, you can change the settings which will fix the size problem, but the colors are still off. If you don't change anything in display settings, the text/icon sizes will revert to normal eventually, but color remains off.

If I connect to him remotely, I do see the problem with the black background, but after that is changed and text/icons change back to normal, the system looks fine from this end.

I have tried updating drivers and ran a virus check, with no luck. I am hoping that someone might no a cause of this that might not involve hardware changes, because the user is at a remote site, and I don't want to bring him down for any period of time if I can avoid it.

(The user also complains of fuzzy text and a red tint, and he going to test with a different monitor. Sounds like a coincidence, but without being there, I cannot say.)

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

14 replies

by dmiles

Check to make sure monitor setting is SVGA,also try adjusting the refresh rate whic may be set to high for the monitor

The display card could be causing the problem,depending on the version of Direct X,that is installed on the machine

The display card may have some compatibility issue
What Operating System driver version seems to be incorrect.

by thechas

For some of the Rage Cards, ATI made several different versions.
Make sure that you have the correct driver for the specific BIOS chip on the video card.

Chas

by pinoy_teknik

Check the Monitor Driver...If your Monitor is Plug and Play you will see it...reconfigure it with the driver...

SYRUPHIN?

by steven

Let the user open paint and make a blue, red and green block. It sound like it could be the blue gun in the CRT tube. If he/she can see the blue, red and green it is not the monitor.

The fuzzy text and red tint would also indicate a faulty tube.
Good luck.

Steven Naude

by thecomputerguy74

I apologize for taking so long to respond. It turned out to be the monitor. Thank you for your help.

And I thank everyone else for their advice. It was all helpful, as it helped me to isolate the problem.

by jjanani

If you already updated the VGA driver then still no improvement its time to test the hardware, you've to buy another VGA card or borrow from a friends, replace the ATI & remove its driver then install the other card including its driver...boot..
asyou know sometimes manufacturing faults is unavoidable..

by wcc

I agree that it is time to try a different Video card, but you also need to consider the mother board drivers. If this is an AGP card or a PCI card you need to have the right drivers for the mother board to support the PCI and AGP buses. Exspecialy the AGP. I have seen with an ATI AGP card where I could run it as a 16 color 640x480 card on Win98, but would get very bad results when I tried to change to colors or resolution. This was a card I had goten out of another PC and had installed into anold clone I had laying around. After finding the AGP mother board drivers and installing them I was able to get the Video card to work AOK. The ATI drivers ALONE were not enough. I had to also have the mother board AGP drivers.

Hope this helps

by thecomputerguy74

We have replaced the monitor and that has corrected the fuzzy text and red tint, but the problem of the system starting with a black background and large icons/text still remains. As I mentioned earlier, after a period of time, these will change tonormal automatically, but they shouldn't be like that in the first place. So I am still working on the solution to this.

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