[Fiachna]

It all started yesterday, my screen flickered and dead pixels were showing up everywhere. Maya 6 PLE's (installed last year so not the problem) rotate gizmo was distorted on a severe scale. tried virus scanner, turned up one trojan, deleted, still have a problem, reinstalled video drivers, screen drivers. Started after my younger brother downloaded a shifty couple of programs that emulate nintendo 64 games, called project 64, 1964 and two perfect dark roms, anyone heard of any of these programs causing trouble? I deleted them but still having problems.

System is Pentium 4 1.6 Ghz, 768MB Ram, Ati radeon 9550 graphics chip, Windows XP Home edition, screen is Samsung 76E CRT screen.

[austin_o]

You could try using driver cleaner and repeat the re-install of the video driver. No guarantee this will fix it. If it does, great. If not, I would work through the malware removal guide at the top of this forum where it says "Do you suspect a malware (Spyware, Virus, Trojan) infection? Please start here. " It could be there is still some malware from these programs that is causing this.

I found a procedure on another forum that solved my video problem. Go to
http://www.drivercleaner.net/ and get Driver Cleaner (it is free). Then make sure you have the current video driver downloaded for your card (I believe you said you have this already). Then go to add/remove programs and remove the current video driver. Then boot into safe mode and run Driver Cleaner TWICE, each time deleting all that it finds. Then reboot and install the current driver. Hope this fixes it. If not, scour for malware.....

[Fiachna]

Thanks for the help but I managed to find the problem, my chip was fried, now I'm forced to revert to my shoddy old Geforce2, I personally find nVidia cards to be dreadful, the chip had been exposed to static electricity, I know this wasn't due to me as I was sure I was wearing cotton and rubber gloves and was in a cork tiled room, so my revelation is to have it replaced.

[austin_o]

Sorry to read that it died. The method you used for anti-static is not a good one. Rubber, cotton and cork tile are all good for generating static electricity. You need a ground strap for your wrist (it has a resistor, 1meg ohm I believe) and a wire to connect to ground on the chassis. Another method is to ground yourself by touching a metal part of the chassis while working inside the computer. Failing to do this could result in major component failure. Static electricity is bad news for computers.