[kafka]

My monitor is showing flickering lines. When I play Age of Empires the flickering continues and, after a while, the AOE screen disappears and is replaced by a black rectangle at the top left of the screen. Pressing the Windows button on the keyboard temporarily returns the AOE screen but the problem recurs a minute or so later.

This happened originally in January but I was able to fix it by deleting a line in the registry and restarting the computer. Unfortunately I didn't keep a note of the line I deleted. I am assuming that Windows replaced the line when I rebooted. I should mention that in my attempts to fix the problem back in December I was able to determine that the problem related to DirectX 11 (I have Vista Business).

[kafka]

The problem returned yesterday. In frustration I googled something like "video problem" and got a Microsoft help site with advice specifically relating to screen flicker. It suggested de-gaussing the monitor and also informed me that flickering can be caused by electronic interference or tangled cables. This sounded promising as the problem wasn't continuous (as I assumed it would be if I had a faulty video card). With some difficulty I managed to deg-gauss the monitor and, sure enough, the flickering stopped. Unfortunately Age of Empires still dropped out. I will now check out the state of entanglement of mu cables and move my wireless phone further away from the monitor.

[muckshifter]

my guess would be graphics card overheating, although with something like AOE I wouldn't suspect it needed a "real gaming" card

Hardware details would help us a bit

[kafka]

Hopefully I've attached hardware details. As I said before, the problem has resolved itself (for the moment) after I degaussed the monitor. Maybe it's just a coincidence?

[muckshifter]

ah, not a games machine then ...

What is the monitor called?

[kafka]

The monitor is an LG Studioworks 710S CRT 15". It's rather old, a carry over from my last computer.

[muckshifter]

Originally Posted by kafka

The monitor is an LG Studioworks 710S CRT 15". It's rather old, a carry over from my last computer.

Well, I think you know that this is one of your bottlenecks, and just to let you know, you are straining the hell out of it by running it at 1024 X 768, it will fail if you continue to run it at that resolution.

800 x 600 is the default display resolution of a 15" monitor.

[kafka]

Thisi was the default resolution when I bought the computer, I have never changed it. According to Windows Help the ideal resolutions for CRT monitors are:

Resolution based on monitor size
Monitor size

Recommended resolution

15-inch monitor

1024 × 768

17- to 19-inch monitor

1280 × 1024

20-inch and larger monitor

1600 × 1200