Okay, I need someone who knows something about computers. I have an HP Pavilion that’s about one year old. The computer came with Windows 98 installed already plus the usual MS works etc. Anyway, every once in a while, my computer will sort of freeze, but do it in a very bizarre way. The screen will “scramble” into a mixture of programs icons and pictures from things I’d been working on hours before. I know this sounds bizarre, and I’m probably not explaining it very well.
Can anyone give me some insight on what might be causing this?
Couple things:
Is it “scrambling” on the “output” portion of a window (e.g. where the webpage is displayed in Internet Explorer, not the outside toolbars and such)? This sounds like retained video memory is being redumped as it’s trying to be freed up by Windows. Also, does the screen redraw everything after it scrambles, or does it leave the scrambled stuff on the screen?
Next time it happens, hit the PrintScreen key, open up Paint, go to Edit > Paste. Save it and post it here, I’m curious as to what it might be.
Try puttin in the video driver again. Make sure you have the right driver for the monitor too…did you change the monitor?
The ENTIRE screen scrambles and freezes. Also, I forgot to mention that restarting the computer is impossible… ctrl+alt+delete does nothing!!! The only way to “fix” the problem is to manually turn off the computer or unplug it (yes, I know that’s not a good idea). I’ll try to capture the image the next time it happens, but nothing on the computer works at all when this happens… maybe I’ll just snap it with a digital camera.
you might want to try in system properties / performance / graphics and set back the video acceleration by a notch (or two or three) and see if that makes things better.
Well, if all that happens, then perhaps you go too much heat inside. Is the cpu fan working?