Computer has glitchy video, I think...

  • Thread starter Thread starter Danno
  • Start date Start date
D

Danno

Hi Everyone,

I'm having a problem with my computer that I never had before. It shows up
mostly in what I see on the monitor. For example, when I want to click and
drag a window, for a second that window doesn't follow the mouse pointer,
giving the impression that I missed it. Then that window will suddenly jump
to where the pointer is. Another example occurs when I'm typing text. I
will type 4 or 5 characters and they don't show up for a second, then
suddenly appear all at once.

Is this a video (card or driver) problem, or is the computer have a problem
processing something else? I keep the computer clean of spyware and
defragged, etc. I think it is basically in pretty good shape. It's running
XP and plenty of power.

I could sure use some help on this issue.

Thanks in advance,
Danno
 
More than likely, that is not a video problem, but a problem with the
computer being busy processing something else. You want to open Task
Manager (You can do this from the prompt at Ctrl-Alt-Del), and go to the
Processes tab. Click on the columnheader for CPU, and it will sort by CPU
usage. This should let you identify the problematic program.

--
Michael Burk

Longhorn Shell
http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn
----===========================----

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
 
Thanks Michael. That might have been it. I have a little program that runs
in the background crunching numbers for SETI. It's totally voluntary and is
not necessary on my machine. When I check with task manager, I see this
program uses 97% of the CPU's resources. Actually, I knew that was the case
but because the priority of that little program is set as low as possible,
it didn't occur to me that it would be able to cause little glitches like
the ones I'm seeing. I'll run the computer without this thing and see if it
makes a difference.

Also, task manager shows me that at any given time, I have upwards of 38-39
processes running all the time. Many of them are programs like Webshots,
Norton, Spysweeper, etc. And usually there are 5 or 6 instances of
svchost.exe (I don't know what that is doing). But of all these processes,
none comes anywhere close to using the resources that the SETI program was.
In fact, when I check task manager to see which processes are using the CPU,
it's task manager itself that is using the most, and that is 2%.

If you don't mind, I would appreciate any further comments you might have.

Thanks a million!
Danno
(p.s.: Happy St. Paddy's Day on Wed.)
 
Well, I still have this problem. I've eliminated the little program that
was working in the background and using most of the CPU's capacity, even
though it's priority had been set to as minimal as possible. So that's not
an issue any more. Still...the computer is acting 'glitchy or jerky'. When
I grab a window to click and drag it, it often doesn't follow the mouse
pointer for a split second, then suddenly jumps to where the pointer is
located. This effect is apparent in various areas throughout my day.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can fix this? It never used to happen and
the computer has plenty of power. (P4 running at 1.9 gig and 512 of ram).

Thanks in advance,
Danno
 
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