Please help.. fairly major problem.

georges · 14 Apr 2006 at 12:12

Hey, I'm guessing this is a gfx card problem but I don't really know so put it here.

Now and then, these yellow lines (as shown on picture) begin to appear at equal intervals along the taskbar. It usually starts with them going just past the quicklinks bar (with winamp, firefox etc on in mine as seen in shot).
The artefacts like this only seem to happen on the start bar, but sometimes a little one can be seen on an icon on the desktop.
eg:

The only other artefact I saw was on the google homepage the "web" part next to images was pink and bold :confused:

It doesn't seem related to overclocking or temperature as I actually underclocked the card because I doubted my pc could actually use the full extent of it and it's an agp4x board anyway.
The temperature is always aroung 48 for the chip edge and 45 for chip surface so that can't be too hot.
Another thing that happens since this started is sometimes the computer will just stop, with the last frame still showing.

Can't find anything in event viewer.
Another thing, I'm on it now and it's fine. 1280x1024 @ 75hz.

System:
Athlon 1800+ (underclocked to 1.1 as my system doesn't like being over 1.2 even though it should

)
Leadtek Winfast A280LE TDH MyVIVO (GF4 TI 4200) @208/462
256mb ram
WinXP Pro
SB Live 5.1
EMU 0404.

Cheers.

Also, one time it happened (only once after it hung, pressing restart, the bios had letters not shown eg: "as s" instead of asus.. on the black and white bit.

Anything that will solve this? Thanks.
George.

As a side note, leadtek really need to murder the guy that did the ui for their "winfox" overclocking/monitoring program.. it's horrendous.. you have to hover over every icon for 3secs to find out what it's for(no labels) and it's all in disgusting colours

.

Thanks.
George.

edit; also, where's the mm incase the gfx is broken and I need to find a cheap old agp card? I couldn't find it.

Ruhbarb · 14 Apr 2006 at 12:24

What make is your monitor ?

Using a screensaver for a few days puts it away if its only discolouration!

Edit... Also change your colour profile and see if it makes a differance

semi-pro waster · 14 Apr 2006 at 12:30

georges said:
edit; also, where's the mm incase the gfx is broken and I need to find a cheap old agp card? I couldn't find it.

The MM is available if you have 250+(or -250 now I guess

) posts and have been here for upwards of 90 days. OcUK do sometimes have good deals in their clearance and B Grade stock though

Do you have speakers or anything like that near the monitor? It looks vaguely like distortion from non-shielded speakers but other than that I'm not sure I'm afraid.

georges · 14 Apr 2006 at 12:47

I have a mitsubishi diamond plus 92 (19" crt) and the speakers are above it. I've always had them in this position for the last 5 years

or however long I've had it so I doubt it is that. It's playing music right now through them and there's nothing there.

When/if it comes back, I'll change the colour profile and see if this helps (This means change it to 16/32bit colour, right?

Two days for the screensaver? :eek:

I've never left it on longer that about 6hours..

I also tried the "advanced desktop redraw" feature on winfox to no avail and as "degauss" on the monitor as that looked like it did a kind of clean up job. Neither of these worked.

SiriusB · 14 Apr 2006 at 12:49

Start Menu and Taskbar are buggered... X-Fire seems unaffected... Maybe it's a Windows problem, rather than your GFX?

SiriusB

georges · 14 Apr 2006 at 13:05

Yeah, its only those two things, no other problems on other programs. It's never happened before (I just put in an old ti4200 to replace the gf3 ti200 *dies*). Seems fairly intermittent as it's still running fine.

I even got cod1 to run on it on full at 1024 with 90fps, although some blue dots appeared intermittently when a roof was slanting away from me at the same angle I was looking when I was in a bell tower.

Computer died again after I closed that down.

It's been running fine with no artifacts since my first post in this thread with firefox and about 10 tabs and winamp going.

edit: If it occurs again, I'll change the theme and see if that helps.

It's happened about 10 times yesterday (I rebooted and it was fine, then came back etc).

georges · 14 Apr 2006 at 13:41

Ok began to happen (a few lines up past the first program on the taskbar.

Here is a shot of the icons it affected.

I had it on 16bit colour, setting it up to 32bit fixed it for now.

georges · 14 Apr 2006 at 13:50

Pretty much a minute after I said that, I went to click another tab in firefox and it just stopped. Stayed on what it was doing. Mouse didn't move, no hard disk use, caps/num/scroll lock don't tun on/off.

I restarted(with the button, so hard restart) and some letters were missing :/

Appears it only fixes the visible problem

Here's the icons as I didn't have time to imageshack them before:

(you have to look carefully as jpeg quality makes the blue dots on the cod icons hard to see.)

Ruhbarb · 14 Apr 2006 at 14:13

I have a mitsubishi diamond plus 92 (19" crt)

yep same monitor as I have got, it happened to me on the left side of screen where my printer sits.

Goes away after a few days deguass it etc and run screensaver to be on safe side and it will gradually go away.

Do shift your speakers though!

georges · 14 Apr 2006 at 14:20

It's only happened with this gfx card and the comp hangs fairly soon afterwards. :s

Thanks guys anyway for the help

I'll move everything away from the monitor.

SiriusB · 14 Apr 2006 at 14:23

I can't see it being the monitor. If it was the monitor the whole screen or one specific portion of the screen would be affected and any graphics showing would show artefacts. The fact that only his Taskbar and Start Menu were affected in his first screen shot suggests the monitor is fine - unless there is something about Windows' graphics that makes displaying them different but I find that highly unlikely.

SiriusB