Long letter but this is so wierd ... all of the sudden this happens -the writing for all my desktop icons, global header for browser, all the filenames in windows explorer, tray on bottom of screen and various other places goes all squirrley. As I'm, writing this I can barely read the words "america online 9.0" in my tray at the bottom of screen. But yet the "Start" button is perfect. If I click on "start" the whole drop up window appears normally, but as I scroll over each item type starts to disappear On this window where I'm typing now I cannot make out any of the words in the 3 dropdown boxes below where it clearly says "Message:" and above the radio buttons for bold, italics, underlined. All I can describe it as similar to writing on a blackboard and then erasing about 98% on the type. I'm assuming that the "black" type on the screen is a combination of all 3 color guns hitting a pixel (please correct me if I'm wrong here - it could be the reverse) - it looks like 70 to 80 % of the typed pixels have completely disappeared while the rest of the pixels are combinations of black, green, red blue, yellow or white (if on dark background) in no particular order. I have gone into display settings to change font size and or type with no effect. At one time I used to see this happening only on RARE occasions where I had been on-line for extended periods and my memory would get clogged. But this is happening on a frequent basis now - in fact I can get MS Publisher to open but the first piece of data to enter will cause this to happen. Will happen even with just one applicaton open.
I have done cold boot, warm boot, system shutdown, and plug pull and seen the problem appear within 2 minutes. Have over 1 gig ram installed and it's good (been tested). Have run scan disk, defrag, Norton av, avg av, cleaned cache, cookies and history. Run adaware from safe mode. Man, I think I've tried everything, but obviously ther's something else amiss here. Whole partition (4 Gb) on drive can be used for virtual memory. All seem to be in order. Have run system with two different video cards (one apg and one pci bus) no difference. Am I missing something here?? My reset button is beginning to hate me
BTW all the graphics EVERYWHERE are fine - this problem only affects some of the fonts - the browser page here is fine EXCEPT for the 3 dropdown boxes that i mentioned previous and the one at the bottom of the page labeled "notification type" - cannot read what's inside dropdown box Thanks in advance.
Terry

Ah, I was thinking all the way through that "it's a video card problem" .... and then you said at the end that you've changed it!

How about reducing the Graphics Acceleration? Go into Control Panel > Display > Settings > Advanced > Troubleshooting.

Reduce the slider bar right across to 'None'. Reboot and see if that helps. If it does, tweak the setting, going up one notch at a time, until the problem appears again. Then reduce it down one notch and everything should be fine.

Unless you play a lot of games.

Been there, done that also. But we'll try it again. Only games I really play are on-line board and word games, so they're not real graphic intensive. Thanks for the help DJ, I (we) really appreciate the service.

Terry

FYI RGB=White :-)~

Has your monitor being knocked recently? Has it got a degauss button - have you any magnetic or EMF fields nearby - Speakers (unsheilded) TV Microwave, US Air base???

Does it have a H-moire setting?

Got a monitor you can borrow to rule it out?

Hi Hippy!!
You guys are great!!

Already degaussed and moire setting does not seem to affect screen at all (?). No other switcable screen to go to, sorry. I tried DJ's fix about slowing down the video, system froze after about 4 to 5 minutes on lowest setting so I clicked it up a notch and we'll see how long it lasts.

Keep the thread open guys, and I'll let you know how things are progressing.

Hippy - thanks for the info regarding tube gun colors, I wasn't sure if it was additive or subtractive (light vs paint) Thanx!!

Terry

Hippy and DJ !!
Nice to have my 'puter back and running AGAIN!! Looks like display problems were probably caused by using an underpowered PCI graphics card that I was using as a temporary fix. Whole problem stems back to my Abit mobo that hit the skids after 3 years. I eventually couldn't boot at all. New Gigabyte board, Radeon graphics and we're back in the game again!! YYYYAAAAAYYYYY!!!

CASE CLOSED!!

Excellent news

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