Windows Vista Re-occuring Vista Display problem.

Hello,

I am having this frustrating problem with my Vista install. About once a day (or so) my computer's display will go crazy. I lose my desktop and it looks like my start bar moves to the upper left hand corner of the screen. Also, it looks like all of my open windows quickly flash in a cycle and I can't do anything with the machine. I have updated the video drivers and the OS. When I go into the event log viewer there are no error or information entries in any event log. According to my current Windows setup, nothing has gone wrong. It seems that the only way for me to fix this is to hard boot the machine and everything seems fine again. I have tried hitting CTRL-
ALT-DEL and doing a log off, but that rarely works.

Also, there is no rhyme or reason to the "freak out ". The workstation can be locked and it happens or I could be using the workstation. I have tried having as few programs open as possible and it does it and I can't find a common program that could be causing it. At one point, I thought it might be my Outlook 2007 and I was only using OWA to get to my e-mail but it still did it.

The Pc is a Dell optiplex GX620 with an Intel dual core 3.40 ghz processor, 4 GB of RAM running Vista business and it has a Radeon x600 video card. The PC is not running the aero theme. I have scoured the Event Log and I can't find a single thing that correlates to the time when it happens. I have searched the web and the forums here and I can't find anything close to this problem.

So my questions are:
1. Has anyone seen this sort of thing before with Vista?
2. How does one turn up the level of event logging in Vista? Obviously, something is happening to the OS but it's not being logged.

Re-installing is an option, but right now work is extremely busy for me (I work for a school district) so I don't want to do that and I'd like to know what is going on because we are planning on deploying Vista soon and I'd like to know how to fix this.

Thank you for any help anyone can provide.

 

Hi and welcome to the BBS,
Have you installed the chipset drivers?
32-Bit Vista
http://support.dell.com/support/dow...etag=&SystemID=PLX_GX620&hidos=WW1&hidlang=en
64-Bit Vista
http://support.dell.com/support/dow...etag=&SystemID=PLX_GX620&hidos=WLH&hidlang=en

It is classified as a workstation and those generally do not tend to have an overly generous power supply. You are running a lot of RAM, is there much other hardware that is "over standard "?
Here is a power supply calculator:
http://www.journeysystems.com/?powercalc
You will need to read the wattage from the label on the PSU.

Is there enough aiflow through the case that it (say, the graphics card) is not getting overheated.

Matt

 

I updated the chipset drivers and it still does it. I don't believe airflow is a problem. It is a 305W output power supply.

I guess my bigger question is how do I ramp up the event logging in Vista.

 

Hi and welcome ddmccullough.

I don't believe you can ramp up the event logging in Vista.

I worry about attacks from the web when strange things like this happen for no apparent reason. What kind of connection do you have?

Check your security and compare with these suggestions (skip down to the red "how to keep from getting infected again ". If no other explanation develops, consider posting on our security forum, but first clean up the machine as suggested in that post.

 

Sparrow,

Thanks for your reply but I don't think I have an infection. This computer is on my work's local area network and we are behind a Cisco PIX firewall. I am running Sophos AV and I am up to date. I have had this problem since I installed Vista. I have updated all of my device drivers and it still happens.

I thought in XP there was a way to increase the level of event logging. I might be mistaken about that.

 

What were the results of the power calculation?

Matt
Frankly, I would go back to , say, 1GB of RAM and see how the system performs. You don't say if any other pieces of extra hardware ( "over standard ") have been added.