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Help! My screen has specks on it

F

fendel

Member
Can anyone advise me on a problem? Suddenly my monitor is showing columns of specks when I have a large field of a dark color onscreen. For instance, if I set my desktop to have a solid black background, or I load a web page with big areas of dark or even somewhat-dark color, I intermittently see the specks. This doesn't happen on lighter backgrounds.

If I take a screen capture and dump it into Photoshop, the specks still show up--unlike other video distortion I've seen in the past. They show up somewhat different, however (the capture doesn't match the actual screen).

Right now I have a black desktop with columns of greenish specks, about half an inch apart vertically and a couple inches apart horizontally.

I can live with this quirk, but I'm worried that it means my monitor or video card is faulty.

Video card: Diamond Monster Fusion, a year or two old
Monitor: Samsung 900NF 19", a couple of months old (aperture grille tube)

A few months back I was seeing distorted type (some columns of pixels not aligned correctly, looking "wavy&quot😉 on my old 17" monitor, a Samsung 700s. I moved that monitor to a different PC and haven't seen the problem since, although that PC is set at a lower resolution. Same video card back then.

I love my monitor (and I've ripped off the UPC label to send in for a rebate) so I'm really hoping I don't have to send it for warranty repairs or anything. If anyone could enlighten me about this (seen anything similar?) I would be eternally grateful.
 
Odds are this is not a monitor problem. If the specs are in neat columns this is almost always a video card problem. Try reducing the refresh rate or change resolutions. If the problem goes away it is most definatly a V/C problem.

 
Wow, my brother had the same problem... he didn't do anything with the card though, it just disappeared after a few hours and haven't shown up since. Really odd.

 
Is your video card overclocked? I got some funky stuff just on the desktop. If not it might be time to upgrade the Monster.
 
hmm, i've had weird stuff show up on my 19 inch, usually pulling out the plug into the vid card and plugging back in fixes it...
 
Hi all, thanks so much for your advice. I'll try these things (unplug/plug, refresh rate, resolution) and see if anything helps.

I am so glad to hear this isn't a monitor problem. It'd be much cheaper to replace the video card than the monitor, and I don't relish the thought of trying to ship this 70-lb thing back to Samsung. And I'm very attached to my monitor.

Interestingly, when I emailed Diamond tech support, I got a predictable email back that boiled down to "maybe your video card is not compatible with Windows ME, we don't have drivers for WinME, you should buy a new video card." (Huh, they're not trying to sell video cards, are they?) I wrote back and told them the card has worked just fine with ME for a few months now, up until this problem, so I doubt the OS has anything to do with it. I also asked them to take a second look at my original email, since their first reply gave no indication they had read anything beyond "OS: Windows ME / Product: Monster Fusion" at the top of the form. :|

I'm not overclocking, but my system seems to run on the warm side and I think the Monster Fusion is a fairly hot card. Hmm.

Again, thank you, you guys have been more helpful than Samsung and Diamond Multimedia combined.
 
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