Wavy watery display

[OBIO]

Earlier this evening, my sister-in-law called and told me that her monitor was acting odd and that the display was very wavy...almost looked like rippling water. So, I goes over, I looks at the monitor...and it sure does look like rippling water. I ask her when the last time she had updated her video drivers..and she looked at me like a cow looking at a UFO....totally no clue. So, I download the updated driver for the onboard video chipset Radeon Xpress 200). Install it. Same thing. I run dxdiag and all looks good there. I rebooted the system and went into the bios and it was set to use the PCI-Express port (no card there to be used) instead of the onboard. I set it to use the onboard. A bit better but still wavy. Hooked the monitor to my nephews computer....and the monitor was not wavy.

Honestly, the system is in need of a total tear down and rebuild. Needs more RAM and a dedicaded video card. But I am hesitant to have her shell out money on a system that could be facing a mother board death.

What do you techies think I should advice her to do? A cheapo PCI-Express video card on Newegg will set her back $35...but then comes the whole power supply issue...the stock powersupply is only 180 watts.....duh...it could be her PSU throwing some odd voltages....hadn't thought of that.

She wants to get a lap top "eventually"...is "eventually" coming sooner than later for her as her HP desk top is looking at taking the long dirt nap?

If she goes laptop...what ones are worth getting that aren't mega bucks? She does a lot of photo stuff, e-mail stuff, videos, and plays Delta Force Xtreme online...so she needs a lap top with the guts to play DFX smoothly.

OBIO

[hey_moe]

Does this also do it in safe mode.

[hey_moe]

I brought this laptop for my daughter in law >>> http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Acer+-+Aspire+Laptop+with+AMD+Athlon%26%23153%3B+Single-Core+Processor/9555769.p?id=1218127632130&skuId=9555769 as far as I am concerned if it crashed for 350 bucks I would just throw it away and buy another. She loves it and has had no problems. I brought a cheap one because she doesn't take care of anything.

[Moparmike]

Is this on a CRT or LCD?

The few times I've seen a rippling display was on CRT monitors that were about ready to give up the ghost. The sync circuits in em start to get freqency drift and cause the rippling.
I've never seen it on an LCD but I suspect the same thing can happen with them too.

It could be power supply ripple on either the on-board vid-card or from the PSU itself.
Does the machine have any stability problems otherwise? PSU voltage fluctuations will cause that too.

With only a 180w PSU, I'm guessing that this is one of those small form-factor machines that doesnt' have a full size power supply in it? that'll make the parts shopping harder too.

If she's already thinking about a laptop, then it might be time to do a complete upgrade. Most of those "bargain" laptops are pretty decent machines. The biggest problem is they usually ship with the bare minimum amount of RAM necessary for the OS to function. I would plan on bumping up the RAM a few Mb (research the models you're looking at and find out the max RAM capacity). RAM is still a fairly cheap upgrade.

DF & DFX is a fairly old game so I would think most of the current machines will have enough vid-card horsepower to run it pretty decent.

[OBIO]

At my sister-in-law's place now. I had a power supply on hand, but it is the wrong form factor. I have my nephew's system up and running for her to use now. The LCD monitor no longer has the waviness to it....though the color is bleached out looking..but that is normal for this monitor (an older Samsung). I am going to take her system home with me and do a reformat and rebuild to see if that helps clear anything up...doubtful but it's a free thing to do to see if the problem is software based.

Will pull all the cards off the motherboard and give everything a good cleaning and reassymble in the off chance that something is just loose and needs a better connection.

OBIO

[OBIO]

I( am now pretty sure (90%) that the power supply is bad. After bringing the system home, giving it a thorough cleaning to remove all the dust...when I plug it in the LED on the back of the power supply and the front power button just blink. Been to the HP trouble shooting section and it states that if all the power cables to the drives, fans, ect are removed and the PSU LED still blinks that the PSU is bad.

To make sure that this is the problem before ordering a new PSU and possibly wasting money, I am going to run the system out to a local repair shop and have him run a diagnostics on the PSU/Mother board. It's a $10 bench fee for him to diagnose the problem.....would rather spend $10 of my sis-in-law's money and know for sure than spend a few hundred buying parts only to end up with a bunch of new parts in a still dead PC.

OBIO