A few days ago, i decided to help a friend in need and opened up my computer to put his hard-drive connected to my IDE, sort of routine for me, and decided to clean out a little bit while I was at it. After all was set and done when I went to close my computer back up again, I noticed my ATI Radeon 9600 Pro's fan was stopped. Now maybe I did something wrong this time, and overlooked it, and maybe it was there all along. Anyways, I kind of fixed it, and left the computer unattended for a while in the afternoon. When I came back home that night, and turned on my monitor, it wouldn't light up as it should, instead i get a yellow-gray faint coloring, as if my brightness was tuned down to the lowest levels. What's more fun, the menu interface to adjust size, rotation brightness, color, width, height, etc still shines up brightly as it used to; in which I drew out the obvious (at the time) conclusion, the graphics card tunned down its settings to prevent from overheating. To my heightened ego, I was right, the fan had stopped working again and it was way hotter than it's used to. I turned the computer off and the screen went back to normal, for a while. So I brought a replacement fan and now it runs smoothly. But guess what? The faint monitor is still there. Every once in a while, if I'm lucky, it will light up correctly. SO, I read in the forums that sometimes updating my video driver things get better. I downloaded the latest ATI catalyst (which to make things more unpredictable was the release yesterday) and installed it, yippee fracking yay, now WITH the driver installed, my computer not only has a faint dark image, the drivers have no effect. I mean, after installing the drivers it looks like if I hadn't installed anything, not even the windows xp driver, and it does that chopping effect whenever I drag a screen. I had updated from 6.12 to 7.2, and determined it could be a release issue, I rolled back to 7.1, and still no good. I disconnected the monitor and tried on another computer I have next door, and the faint dark effect is the same, which explains the faulty monitor, but the bad graphics installation? What the heck is going on? Is just my monitor to blame, or has my video card gone wrecked as well? I mean, could these driver installations be affected by the faulty monitor, or will I have to change my video card as well? Thanks in advanced to anyone who reads this essay and actually answers something productive. Thanks.
I tried another monitor. The monitor works fine, the video drivers keep installing and they keep chopping up my screen.
What are your computer SPecs?? If you have onboard Video then try to hook the monitor with that and see if it works..:unsure: This looks more like the monitor problem to me. Can you bring his Monitor and check it with your computer?
Yeah, done so, actually I have it on right now. Monitor works great, but my graphics look like its some cheap VGA card.
Ok, good news. I rolled back my to the day before this started happening (first time windows system restore ever did me any good) and got the videocard working back straight. Woohoo! So now aparently my only problem is the monitor. Since it was an old 17 inch CTR monitor, about 7 to 8 years, and it was probably it's time anyway, I'm trying to figure out if it really was the overheated card that blew it, or just a major coincidence in the time that I left my PC unatended. If it was my card that fried the monitor, that could have had repercussions on the card itself. Is there a program I can use and benchmark my videocard to compare it to a standard ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, in order to make everything is running smoothly? Cause if it's alright, I can atleast sleep well knowing I'm not gonna have to spend anymore money with this PC for some time (I'm kinda saving up to get a really upscale PC that's not only vista ready, it's vista killer, so a new monitor will do me anyway, but buying another AGP graphics to then have to switch to PCI-E later would be a pain in the back.) Another thing, when I do benchmark my graphics, is there a site I could go to compare the results? Thanks again to everyone who replied.
