Intermittant "blank" pixels appear in title bar of Windows apps

jsulmeyerjsulmeyer
edited June 2005 in Science & Tech
Several months ago I upgraded to Windows XP. About a month later I noticed what appeared to be two dead (white) pixels in the upper right corner of the title bar of my browser window. Oddly, though, these "dead" pixels were not really dead, but would disappear when I clicked on the title bar or resized the window. Even more strange, if I dragged the window across the screen, the "dead" pixels would actually follow along, i.e. stay in the same place on the title bar and move across the screen along with the window being dragged.

This phenomenon has occurred, intermittently, ever since. Sometimes it's one pixel, sometimes its three or four, and 99% of the time it occurs in the right hand corner of a window's title bar (I have seen it occur on my desktop, as well). I've tried several different monitors and monitor cables, but I've been unable to get this behavior to stop. I spoke to a tech support guy at Samsung (maker of my flat panel monitor) and he believed that the problem was a software issue - probably Windows XP itself - rather than a hardware issue. I tried addressing the issue with Microsoft, but they were no help.

This behavior is really annoying and I'd GREATLY appreciate any assistance I can get.

Much thanks,

John

Comments

  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited June 2005
    John

    I would look more to your video card and drivers as the potential source of this. What are your system specs including all hardware and settings and if overclocked?

    If you have another video card, you could try that.
  • jsulmeyerjsulmeyer
    edited June 2005
    Thanks very much for the speedy reply. I'm not sure exactly what specs you're looking for, but I'm running Windows XP Professional SP2 on a generic Pentium 4, 2.40GHz, with 512 RAM. My video card is an ATI Radeon 7000 series with drivers dated 11/30/04. The driver version is 6.14.10.6505. I'm not overclocking. I don't have another video card, but I could certainly try to find/borrow one and see if that makes a difference.

    I'm downloading updated drivers as I write this and will let you know if they have any effect on the problem. Please let me know if you need any additional information :-)

    Much thanks,

    John
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited June 2005
    I think for the time being the info you provided will suffice. This will be a good place to start and we can take it from here and see who else has more ideas along the way.
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited June 2005
    What happened?????

    did you get it fixed?
  • GrayFoxGrayFox /dev/urandom Member
    edited June 2005
    He could have a bad cap on his videocard (H.I.S. Tech radeon 7000 & 7500 were effected)
  • jsulmeyerjsulmeyer
    edited June 2005
    mtgoat - thanks for your patience. it's about 1am and I just got back. I installed the new drivers, but I'm still getting the intermittent blank pixels. I guess the next step is to try a new video card?

    GrayFox - I appreciate your checking in - could you explain what a "bad cap" is? Is it something that can be fixed?

    Much thanks,

    John
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited June 2005
    Cap = Capacitor (cylindrical object sticking up from top of card)

    Sometimes these go bad and eventually leak.
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