I have a friend who has a Samtron 17" CRT (Samsung)
I built the tower myself to help him save some money... as he uses his PC for school.
He has been experiencing a problem with the screen jumping (or scrolling really fast) It is an intermittent problem that I have been unable to reproduce when I am present.

This is the hardware list from the invoice purchased May '05

Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live 24-Bit PCI Sound Card (Retail Box)

AMD Athlon XP 2900+ Socket A CPU 400FSB BartonCore1M17-7500 O T Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition OEM Version1S457-1052

Masscool / Socket A/370 / AMD Athlon up to XP 3200+ / Ball Bearing / Copper Core / CPU Cooling Fan

1 ATI Radeon 9600 128MB

Toshiba / 16x4x16x DVD+RW / 12x4x16xDVD-RW / 5x DVD+R DL / OEM Black DVD Burner

120MM8 E Maxtor 120GB EIDE HD 7200/8MB/ATA-1331U13-4113

US Robotics 5660A 56k V.92 PCI Modem2V13-4003

Vantec Stealth
80mm Cooling Fan with Double Ball Bearing - Silent

1 Soyo KT 600 Dragon motherboard (kit with case)


I have:
Updated Windows/Zone Alarm/AVG
He has Diskeeper 10 (at my urging) Fragmentation=negligible
I've updated every driver ...Clean install of latest video-card drivers in particular
The PCI modem is NOT in use... he has an external cable modem/broadband
The video card was an older one of mine-- slightly used-- has run fine up until now. I doubt it has a hundred hours total on it.

He did get IE7 via auto-update (before I knew)

I suspect a dying monitor-- any other ideas? I have NOT tried reverting to IE 6. I myself have been running IE 7 without incident for a month (under XPSP2)

Hrmmm....Do you mean like a vertial scroll? where the image keeps flashing up the screen? Like a poorly tuned TV?

Yes, exactly-- and according to my friend... it only does it when the cursor is in the "body" of the screen (as opposed to the Menubar/Scrollbar)

...as I said I have been unable to observe this directly-- and my friend is just barely past "newbie" level. So getting accurate description is a problem. Decent person.... but expects me to "just know" :
a) What he means
b) How to fix it instantly
<sigh>

Well....
to be honest, it sounds like the monitor is dying, the cable is loose (most likely 2) or the video card...which i highly doubt.

As the problem is intermittant, i'd suggest wiggling the cable a bit to see if it "forces" it to happen...if so - new cable (or as most CRT's had the cable inbuilt...) new monitor.

That was my thought-- I just wanted to run it by you guys first-- he can get a refurb for now as the funds are limited-- I found a refurb Dell CRT for under $70 US-- I'll check the cable first --of course. I really doubt the card is the culprit.

Thanks G

Marked as answered.