Maximum PC

My system is pretty old and I'm experiencing unusual behavior. I think it is probably my video card, but I'm seeking a second opinion.

Sometimes when I scroll a page with the mouse wheel the screen changes for a moment into a half black and half white image divided diagonally. Also, sometimes I'll come back to the system after its been sitting idle for a while and discover that randomly dispersed pixels are random colors. It looks like pixel sized confetti has been thrown on the screen.

Rebooting tends to fix both problems, but sometimes I've found the system has to be off for a while.

My guess is that the video card is overheating a little.

Any other ideas?

Thanks in advance for your help.

It's a Geforce 7900 GT and according to the NVidia control panel's System Information->display the drivers are 275.33. I see though that the file versions are 6.14.12.7533 for all of the files.

I'm not thinking it is a driver issue though cause this has just started happening after years of good operation.

I experienced the same issue with several different videocards over the years and my guess is that your videocard is either overheating or is on its way out.

Speaking of overheating, run HWMonitor. Make sure you run it as an admin if you're on Windows Vista/7 by right clicking on it and selecting "Run as Administrator". If you're using Windows XP, you can just run it as is.

If your video card is approaching somewhere along the lines of 80-90C, it's cooling is buggered.

I'm running the hardware monitor you recommended, but I don't actually see the temperature of my video card. I see the motherboard has two temps on it (TMPIN0 & TMPIN1), the processor has a temp for each core, and the hard drive is reporting an assembly and an air flow temp.

Is there something I need to do to see the video card temp?

Are you running it under an administrator account or with elevated privileges? http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/h ... sions.html should get you going.

I'm on XP, so it should have admin rights by default.