Alright, I wasn't planning to ask about it but what harm could it do?
I have an old Sony Vaio desktop computer that was made in like 2005 I wanna say. Used to belong to my dad and now I have it. I don't know what modifications he made to it when he had it, but I seem to recall him saying he replaced the video card and possibly added more memory. Not sure. Anyway, I got it from him last year and around March of this year the thing went screwy and died (as in, I could hit the power button and some lights would come on and the fan would start up, but there was no display and no sound). I gave the tower to my brother in law to fix, and got it back about a month ago. I was told the problem was with the video card, and that they had replaced it with one they had "lying around" in the basement that seemed to work (my brother in law does computer work, networking, repairs, etc so they have tons of spare parts lying around). I was a little unhappy with getting a used video card, but beggars can't be choosers n all that.
Well, a couple days ago the display started getting funny. I'm having the worst time describing it so I'll just show you a couple photos I have.
What seems to be happening is the color is bleeding across the screen from images and text. The windows are also now all slightly transparent. So, see how the top half of the right window is dark, and the bottom half is lighter? The white color from the bottom window is bleeding across the screen and brightening the bottom half of the upper window. Also the stripes of grey you see all through the right window are from the text. This distortion/color bleeding stays right with the windows when I move them as well. No lag.
My first thought was that the monitor was fucking up but this is not the case. I took the tower downstairs and hooked it up to my mother's computer monitor which I know to be working perfectly, and I had the same effect. This leads me to believe the problem is with the video card.
Alright, stats:
PC:
Sony Vaio running Windows XP Professional
System Model: PCV-RZ56G(UC)
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.40 GHz (2 CPUs) (this is /not/ what I remember the computer having before I gave it to my bro in law to fix. Might he have given it a new processor as well then?)
Memory: 2048 MB
Video Card:
NVIDIA RIVA TNT2/TNT2 Pro
Memory: 32 MB
One more pic because it gave me the perfect example. See how the lines from the buttons are bleeding across the screen? And the faint gray stripes that come out from the text? That's not because I took a picture of the computer screen with my phone. That's actually there.
Incidentally, these ATI Catalyst files from the old video card are still on the computer. BeachBum mentioned those might conflict with the new video card and cause problems. Could that be what made everything start acting funky?
Also I wanna stress, I do not use this machine for gaming. It is strictly for web browsing, chatting, downloading, and watching videos/movies on it. No gaming.
