Video goes corrupt every once and a while

Ended up being a driver issue after all. Don't I feel like an idiot.





I'm thinking its my video card, but I'm not positive.

From time to time either the screen will become garbled to the point of no recognition, or a row of pixels will turn off on my monitor. Its as thick as two lines of text in this post. Its just a black line.

If I take a screen shot, the picture shows up fine, so its only what is being projected to me.

It happens when I am at stock, or overclocked, and regardless of refresh rates. I doubt its my monitor.

I have seen a pattern when it happens. It only happens when my screen goes from one thing, to a complete other.

For example, if I was on my desktop, that might be all white, and it has to instantly go from that, to all black in a full screen program, it might screw up. I usually have to restart, or sometime I can just go back to where I was previously and it'll be fine.

I'm thinking this its my TI 4200, but has anyone ever had this problem? I havn't until now. :/

Have you tried changing the drivers?

My old Matrox Millenium 2 + Voodoo2 Combo had a similar problem, and over time I also noticed many artifacts just on the desktop, usually on the taskbar. I'm not sure which card was the problem, but occasionally I would have freezes on the desktop as well, with a bright line on the top of the screen.

I've also had similar problems when the overall system became unstable and needed a format, and the problem went away after that.

My suggestion would be to re-install the drivers, and if that doesn't work, try running the card in a different system. The card isn't necessarily dead, as something may have been corrupted on your system.

Edit: I just read what you mentioned about the screenshots, and this indicates that the card itself has a problem; again, the only thing I can say is to re-install drivers and try the card in another system.

I did reinstall them. Didn't help.

It sounds like you might be right about something getting corrupt somehow, this install of Win XP hasn't been feeling right, I just hate reinstalling so much because my DVD drive usually acts up and it takes so many attemps before I can actually get windows installed.

Just happened again, only this time I wasn't doing anything. I was reading in my browser and my monitor all of a sudden said it couldn't display the picture because it was 40hz. So I got mad and unplugged the monitor while it was all still on and plugged my other one in, and it said the same thing, so its not my monitor's problem.

I'm thinking some part of the Vcard might be damaged.

Is there any place that logs information that I could look at that might help me?