Trippy Video Card

[Lord J]

So, I come into the living room this morning to find my wife's laptop on the floor. Thinking nothing of it (it has a bad habit of being placed in awkward places and sometimes getting knocked off) I pick it up and open the cover. The picture is horrible. All of the white in the documents she had open is now a bright blue. The yellow (and possibly magenta) of all of the icons is offset by a few pixels. The background (our cats) has a strange green splotch that is wavering over our cat's black fur.

I restart a few times, no avail.

I open up the nvidia control panel, and wonk around with gamma, brightness and contrast, and that makes the blue go away. It also sharpens the test image quite a bit. I'm using those settings now, and the forum actually looks mostly good, if I ignore the weird red dots on the sides of the posting window and the green/magenta noise behind the top menu board.

Anyway, I haven't tried a secondary monitor yet, so I don't know if it's the monitor or the card. I suspect the monitor since that's what the laptop landed on. I played a little minecraft (1.5 is out today! Woot!) and that was a trippy experience. The sunlight was... strange, and the sand had this crimson undertone, like someone had bled all through it. Smoothstone had an iron-like tinge, and one block of smoothstone looked kind of like lapis, but although I mined down to lava (and died) I didn't find any. I kind of wonder if there was lapis or diamond far underneath the lava and that's what was causing the blue (I've heard of this before with certain video cards). Dwarf Fortress looked horrible, but then I increased the gamma to nearly 100%, and that made it look pretty decent. Now the buttons beneath my address bar on chrome are magenta, but overall it looks pretty good.

So opinions? What does it sound like to you guys?

EDIT: Lol, I just noticed that my cursor now has a splash of magenta. On the mickey mouse link hand it looks a little bloody!

[Andrew]

Make sure to backup all important info.

Probably only way to know for sure is to hook up to external monitor like you said.

Sadly, my monitor in past week has shutdown on its own (while I was actively using it) twice. Hoping it doesn't die, as otherwise it works fine. Don't want to buy a new one until fall. Could have something to do with dual monitors (tv), but I doubt it. Good news is that LED monitors use almost 1/2 the electricity as my ccfl monitor (25 watts vs 45 watts).

[athanasios]

Graphics Card? I have one ATI damaged here and it spits magenta and reverses the mouse in BootitNG from white to black. Even the one I am using on my PC right now adds some dots of magenta from time to time. Yesterday it rebooted my PC repeatedly (I suppose it was the culprit as I got a message from Winblows that an nv******.dll caused an error). Soon I will need to buy a new one I guess. But if the magenta etc is NOT solid it might something else: the monitor or a connection to the monitor?

[Lord J]

Oddly seemed to "get better" sometime in the past few days. I noticed yesterday that it didn't look as fuzzy, and today I played with the video card settings and it's right as rain. I think it's so creepy how technology seems to fix itself sometimes. I had a similar thing with my iPod touch: one evening it started acting as if someone was touching the main button on the bottom intermittently. I wiped it and put the firmware and all of my software back on, and it continued. I turned it off and put it away for a few days, picked it up, and it's worked fine ever since. I'm using it to write this very message!