Weird striping on screen-what does it mean?

[LKDog]

Started getting some weird striping on my screen. It is vertical and looks like about 4 or 5 one inch wide blinds down the screen.
They are either red or blue. Sometimes text starts to turn red for no reason also lately.

My monitor is a 20" Sony CPD 520.
Video card is ATI 9800.

All temps look OK on mobo/cpu/hd/.
Not getting artifacts-just the striping.

What does this mean. Is monitor or Video card going bad on me?

[SRTDodge05]

My guess its the monitor, did you check the connects and try a different vga cable?

[LKDog]

Thanks for response.

Cable is good. Connections seem good. Heavy duty one I got for this monitor.

When you say "it's the monitor" do you mean as in it is starting to crap out?


It is probably about 3+ years old or maybe 4.
Gets used a few hours a day. I have it go into standby after 20 minutes of no activity.

Video card is also about 3 or 4 years old I think.
Case and components stays pretty cool according to the temps in Speed Fan.

[SRTDodge05]

Originally Posted by LKDog

Thanks for response.

Cable is good. Connections seem good. Heavy duty one I got for this monitor.

When you say "it's the monitor" do you mean as in it is starting to crap out?


It is probably about 3+ years old or maybe 4.
Gets used a few hours a day. I have it go into standby after 20 minutes of no activity.

Video card is also about 3 or 4 years old I think.
Case and components stays pretty cool according to the temps in Speed Fan.

Sounds like the monitor is letting go but i could be wrong. Do you have another monitor or a video card to try?

[LKDog]

I think I have an older ATI card I could throw in there.

Something might be going bad here.
I think I recall some text starting to turn red a couple weeks ago.
Did not think much of it-thought it was just an anomaly of the website forum I was on.

The striping started today and was not application specific-it was across web pages and then the Desktop wallpaper-everything.

Funny thing is has stopped in the last half hour.

[SRTDodge05]

Next time it happens try hitting your monitor to see if that does anything.

[LKDog]

Originally Posted by SRTDodge05

Next time it happens try hitting your monitor to see if that does anything.

Ok, you got me on this one.

What should happen when I hit it?

It is a Trinitron (aperture grill?) monitor since it is a Sony.

[SRTDodge05]

When your screen is showing those color lines on the screen hit your monitor in the back to see if it makes the lines go away.

[LKDog]

OK. So that will indicate that the monitor is starting to go.
Gotcha.

Will post back and let you know after it happens again.

[SRTDodge05]

Ok, we'll be here waiting.

[LKDog]

Well, it happened again when I was reading an email in Outlook.
Blue vertical streaks of horizontal lines:

________ ________ etc.
________ ________
________ ________
________ ________
________ ________
________ ________

You get the idea. A little more closely spaced together horizontal lines than above. All the way across the page.

When I banged on the monitor it actually got a little worse. The blue started to bleed a little into the background more beyond the lines. Hard to describe, but it did not clean up-it got more pronounced for a bit.

Then went away after a couple minutes.



Ahhhh......it is doing it now. Some of the text in this response I am posting is getting red tint. When I moved the set of lines above-it left a blue trail.

[LKDog]

http://forums.techguy.org/hardware/5...ical-blue.html

Found this when doing a Google search on issue.
The picture is very similar to my issue.
The guy claims it is a video card issue in that thread, but who knows.
Will dig up my old ATI card and swap it in tomorrow.

[Drufuss]

Hello LKDog

Well, i don't know ifr i understand your fault description the way it is intended, but if i see such symptoms here at work, its normally the graphics-card that has to be exchanged and sent for repair.

Using a spare graphics card or a spare monitor for some time would be wise, to determine if the problem is card or monitor related.

Greetings

Dru

[SRTDodge05]

Its hard to tell i had that problem twice in the past. One time it was the video card and the other was the monitor.

[LKDog]

OK...Just put in an old ATI Radeon 7000 VE I had laying around that I bought for 7$ to use to test for video card issues with PC's.

According to ATI Tool it has 32MB of memory.

One good thing is it is quiet as it has no fan.

Will keep you posted.

So far so good after 10 minutes.

I had the monitor off all night and do leave the computer on 24/7.
I had the blue horizontal line streaks right away this morning.

My hunch right now is the video card.