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Hello all.
Today I just gave my computer a dust cleaning sweep, same as I've done several times before. This time I got some plaid lines on my display. At first a simple restart cured it, until I tried playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The display looked like a junkie's hallucination.
Thinking this was an overheating problem, I unseated the video card, cleaned every scrap of dust I could find off the heatsink, put it back in. That actually made the problem much worse. I made sure the video card's fan is working, there's no sign of burnt power prongs. I've installed new drivers from ATI, and that sortof improved the problem. Now half my display is ok, the other half is covered in purple plaid lines. Except now my new games won't run at all, they say video drivers aren't installed correctly. Anything requiring Direct3D doesn't work, even older games have display issues now.
My video card is an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. I've tried rolling back to an earlier driver, tried lowering my resolution to 800x600, lowered colour quality from 32 to 16-bit, turned off hardware acceleration, no dice. I have an old GEForce2 card I could try, that could narrow this down as a Mobo/Vidcard issue. I suppose I could try updating DirectX, but I'm worried my old GEForce card wouldn't work with the new software.
Does anyone have any ideas?
Today I just gave my computer a dust cleaning sweep, same as I've done several times before. This time I got some plaid lines on my display. At first a simple restart cured it, until I tried playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The display looked like a junkie's hallucination.
Thinking this was an overheating problem, I unseated the video card, cleaned every scrap of dust I could find off the heatsink, put it back in. That actually made the problem much worse. I made sure the video card's fan is working, there's no sign of burnt power prongs. I've installed new drivers from ATI, and that sortof improved the problem. Now half my display is ok, the other half is covered in purple plaid lines. Except now my new games won't run at all, they say video drivers aren't installed correctly. Anything requiring Direct3D doesn't work, even older games have display issues now.
My video card is an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. I've tried rolling back to an earlier driver, tried lowering my resolution to 800x600, lowered colour quality from 32 to 16-bit, turned off hardware acceleration, no dice. I have an old GEForce2 card I could try, that could narrow this down as a Mobo/Vidcard issue. I suppose I could try updating DirectX, but I'm worried my old GEForce card wouldn't work with the new software.
Does anyone have any ideas?
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