My monitor, a SyncMaster 712n, now displays the entire screen with a squiggly effect. It tends to be worse on one side; last night the left side of the screen, facing me, was worse, today its the right side.

Unplugging the monitor to see the check signal box, and plugging it into another computer (my mother's laptop, in this case) has shown that the monitor itself is not the problem, but my computer. Sage theorizes that my graphics card (onboard graphics for me) is starting to go. I'm hoping that this isn't the problem, as the only extra graphics card I have is not compatible with the computer and because of living 32 miles from the nearest town, living on a fixed income, and having nearly 5 bucks a gallon in the way of gas prices (not the best conditions of living, which is why we're moving sometime this year), I cannot afford to get even the cheapest of decent graphics cards.

Are there any possible explanations for my computer's weird-ass behavior (other than hating my guts?) that I can explore and see if I can fix? I'd really rather not lose computer access for anywhere between a month and six months.

I'd check the connectors on the end of the cable that hooks into the computer, they get smashed easily and if bent the tiniest bit it can cause hell for a monitor. It happened to me with my old gateway and all I needed was a new cable with better connectors.

That's all I got for the minute.

Edited by Black Dranzer.exe on June 14, 2008 at 13:39:47.

Again, it's not the monitor--I said that already. The monitor works fine on any other computer (such as my brother's old computer, which I'm using right now.) My computer tower is the problem. I'm just trying to find out what in my computer is the problem.

I don't know if this is the problem because I'm not real savvy with hardware but I'm willing to suggest something. Maybe you could take a look inside your computer tower, make sure everything is clean and dust free...sometimes dust and junk get caught between connecting cables causing bad things to happen. Rarely happens but it is possible, I just hope this was of SOME help if not the cure.

You know what...I just thought of something.

Does the monitor have cooling vents on it that can lead to the inside against the screen. I had an old plasma TV that did and when the cooling vents let dust in, it collected against the inside of the screen and played with how things looked on screen.

If you've opened it up already, disregard this.

As I have said time and time again, THE MONITOR IS NOT THE PROBLEM.

Hell, I'm using the same monitor on this backup computer.

Anyways, this is kinda old and the problem was determined to be the graphics card.

Well, it looks like there's no way around that then....you'll just have to settle for getting a new graphics card like thought to have been the problem in the first place.

I have fixed my computer's graphics problem, by installing a new motherboard generously supplied by Ribitta. This motherboard is virtually identical to my old one, save that it has an extra slot for a stick of RAM and the graphics on that haven't failed.

Now, with this done, my computer loaded up without problems. My brother logged into the guest account for the computer, since he didn't know my account's password. However, later, when I tried to switch accounts to my own, I had problems: The password went in, but then it'd switch right back to the account selection screen. No matter how many times I put in the password, it kept doing this, without telling me what was wrong.

So I reset the computer after returning to the guest account, and then the real problem hit: while loading up, the computer got past the eMachines logo with the BOOT and BIOS options, went past a screen for BIOS in which I could open using SHIFT+F10, and then went to a screen where its supposed to scroll down with a number of things before switching over to Windows XP loading.

Except things never scrolled down. It stayed with a blinking _ cursor at the top and went no further. Forcing a reset did not help, it continued to load up to that point and stop.

So... anyone knows what's going on and how I can fix it?

Okay, so now this problem has been taken care of: the motherboard that Ribitta gave me required a 24-pin power supply, and my computer had a 20-pin power supply, so it didn't have enough power to turn on properly anymore. That power supply has now been replaced, and as such, this topic can be locked now.