Half a year ago I traded in my 64 Mb GeForce4 MX 440 with a little aditional money for an Asus ATI Radeon 9600 SE.
The GeForce had died on me so they had to send it back and I could get a refund as long as I used that money
to buy my next videocard in the same store. A pretty sweet deal at the time.
It worked great too, I don't often game
(with an early form of RSI I shouldn't game at all, but sometimes the urge is just too great
)
but when I do I like the new games and I don't need max performace, but I do want them to run smoothly.
So about a week ago I was playing C&C Generals: Zero Hour (cool game BTW)
and it ran smoothly till halfway through the game all of a sudden I got weird lines on the screen
and everything started to 'trail' and leave traces on the screen.
Eventually the game crashed and I rebooted, now all of a sudden the same thing started happening in Windows (XP)!
Now my computer can get pretty dusty so I figured that perhaps I should just clean it out and try again.
I cleaned every fan and wiped the dust and junk off everything.
I put everything back and the lines stopped! Woot! I can even play C&C again.
However the lines came back periodically and ever more frequent when the comp was on for a long time
until they were just always there.
I figured that the GPU must've gotten too hot and fried itsself
because the fan couldn't work properly with all the dust or something.
But the odd thing was that everything worked fine in Knoppix (Linux)...
So I reinstall Windows (XP Pro) and everything was good UNTIL I installed the Catalyst drivers from ATI.
Now appearantly my videocard works good with the default drivers,
but the instant I install the official drivers (the Asus or ATI drivers) I get the lines again.
I am at a loss as to what this problem is....
I am going to try the videocard in the comp of a friend soon and see if it produces the same results there
and then probably take it back, but I'd like to understand what the hell the problem is
before I have to face the salesman again.
Can anyone please help me?
Below are pics of my desktop,
the first is with the latest version of the official Catalyst drivers
and the second is with the Catalyst drivers removed
and the default XP drivers installed.
Note that a lot of the files still aren't displayed properly but the screen isn't filled with those lines any more.
