Help! My screen has specks on it

[fendel]

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.

 

[Gosharkss]

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.

 

[Looney]

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.

 

[H8tank]

I've seen that once, it was a faulty 8MB S3 AGP card. Replaced the card, no more specs.

 

[StickHead]

Is your video card overclocked? I got some funky stuff just on the desktop. If not it might be time to upgrade the Monster.

 

[Bignate603]

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...

 

[fendel]

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.