Pc Tech Support: Visual Distortion

[nemt]

Randomly my PC will experience severe visual distortion on the desktop, around anything currently displayed (windows, cursor, icons, start menu, etc).

Does anyone have any idea what can be causing this? It's happened a few times in the past, but now it's happening very frequently. I have a Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card with the newest drivers.

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/3721/wtfssoj6.jpg

 

[PokeParadox]

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess on it being the drivers.

Sometimes when the resolution changes for me, I get similar but much worse display distortion. A quick fix sometimes is just to but the laptop to sleep and wake it up straight away and it re-initialises the display. (I have an x700 in my laptop...)

So I guess it's something screwy in the drivers.

 

[craigix]

Refresh rate?

 

[nemt]

I haven't updated the drivers lately, but it's been having this problem across several driver updates. Rebooting will bring things back to normal, but not for long.

Could it be a heat/dust issue with the card?

 

[Aninhumer]

I would say that was a hardware issue, you could check for dust and such, but it may just be fried.

Same thing happened to my brother's computer, but he had only just got it so we sent it for repair.

And if it is fried it's a good excuse to get a brand new one

 

[moz]

had this with one of my cards

i messed up the GPU and RAM timings, try putting them back to the defaults.

i was running ATItool

 

[Vimacs]

This usaly happens when the ram corrupts, either cause of overheat or cause its dead, may also be a defective pixel pipe but thts unusal.

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

This problem can usually be down to one of three things:
1. Your graphics drivers have become corrupt - try starting in VGA mode, if the fault is still there, then it aint the drivers.

2. If your graphics card is on board, then maybe the area of memory your BIOS has reserved for video is bad, try changing your RAM.

3. If you have an AGP/PCIE graphics card then maybe that has a fault. Usually in the memory area as it is corrupting the display. If it was in the GPU area, your PC would more likely be crashing. Try re-seating your card, if the fault persists, try another card.