Odd Screen Behaviour

[Danny W]

Periodically (more frequent when the system is busy), the screen flickers on
my PC (Win XP Pro SP1a). Just before flickering, the system briefly stops
responding (1-2 sec at the most).

I use an nVidia Vanta 16MB AGP graphics card on a VIA chipset (AGP 4x) - AMD
Athlon XP 2000+ + 256MB DDR2100 RAM.

I get all the critical and recommended as well as driver updates from
Windows Update.

Can anyone think how I could stop this?

 

[Chuck]

Periodically (more frequent when the system is busy), the screen flickers on
my PC (Win XP Pro SP1a). Just before flickering, the system briefly stops
responding (1-2 sec at the most).

I use an nVidia Vanta 16MB AGP graphics card on a VIA chipset (AGP 4x) - AMD
Athlon XP 2000+ + 256MB DDR2100 RAM.

I get all the critical and recommended as well as driver updates from
Windows Update.

Can anyone think how I could stop this?

Danny,

Has this always been a problem? Or did it start after some system
change?

If you indeed have all the latest updates, and drivers (don't depend
upon WindowsUpdate for your video and network drivers - check with
each vendor), the next thing to check would be malware.

See what's running when this happens. Windows Task Manager is useless
here. Get Process Explorer (free) from http://www.sysinternals.com -
you can see all the processes / services running, what modules are in
them, and who distributed each module.

You might want to check for malware first. SWI Forums is a good place
to start for advice. Get Spybot S&D and HijackThis - both free too.
Start here:
http://forums.spywareinfo.com/index.php?showtopic=5187

Cheers,

Chuck
I hate spam - PLEASE get rid of the spam before emailing me!
Paranoia comes from experience - and is not necessarily a bad thing.