Video Card dying?

[Chris D]

Figures. Every time I deploy with the military, that's the time that everything breaks around the house. Well, my wife tells me that our computer "is broken". Nice, didn't tell me much. After some prompting, she says that the last few days, it would go to the screensaver at the determined period of inactivity, however, it then froze on the first screensaver image. (I have a slide show set up for the screensaver) When she moved the mouse or hit a key to return from the screensaver, she said nothing happened. But if she turned the monitor off and then back on, it came back up to the desktop. (did nothing else with the CPU itself)

Well, apparently, now, it's worse. She says when she turns it on, she gets red lines and major distortion on the screen at all times. Pretty much unreadable.

Some of you may remember that I had my video card cooling fan fail, maybe 9-12 months ago, and I took it to a store for a replacement fan, and it's been working fine since. Well, now I'm wondering if the video card itself is failing, if it could be connected with the past fan issue at all, or whether it's something else completely.

Of course, it sucks that I can't be there in person to help diagnose. You guys have any ideas?

[Kevin P]

She turns the monitor off and on, and it works normally after that? Is it an LCD monitor?

More likely than not it's the video card, but if it's an LCD, it could be the monitor as well. If you have an old CRT monitor kicking around, try that and see if the problem goes away.

[Chris D]

Nope, it's a honkin' 19" Dell CRT monitor. 2002 model.

But it no longer fixes everything to turn the monitor off and on. Could it be the actual monitor? Or is it more likely that the last few days of resetting the monitor just jolted the video card out of it's rut?

[Leef DaLucky]

Could be a wonky monitor..
big boys like that tend to die slowly and let you know well in advance.
Time for that new 21" wide LCD?


It's probably something simple though.
I definitely try:
a)taking the monitor cord/power cord off and re-applying them.
b) Take the side panel off the comp, take off power cord and carefully reseat the vid card.
c) take some compressed air and give the vid card a good spray.
d) getting newer drivers.

is it an agp card?
One of the newer nvidia's (>6XXX)?
Did you have to attach another power lead from your power supply just to power the fan on?
it might not have enough juice.
Also, since its summer, the heat might have something to do with it.
Mine's been acting wonky all season (no air conditioning here= bad for circuits).

If it IS the monitor, happy shopping! There's some wicked stuff out there this year!

cheers,
Mikey