Serious help needed.

[dragonsdagger07]

I was given an Emachine T2642. The original owner said it wasn't working because of too much porn or something...SO I took the computer home. Yes it was full of spyware and alot of crap, viruses...ect..SO I tried to clean it up, then I received this message across the screen...syntax error.
After that happened my display started getting all garbled, then started shaking, then it was gone.
I tried everything I could think of to get it to work. No go..So I went out and bought WindowsXP Home Edition. I reinstalled it correctly, and still had a screwed up display. Only this time it would come up, but in 4bits and very small...my screen image was approximately 9 inches wide and 12 inches long...all messed up, then it would shake to the point where it would eventually go to a completely blank grey screen and sit there and do nothing.
Ok So one more time I went in the mainframe thingy and repartitioned drive C and reinstalled windows xp again.
Now I am back on again...SO this time I was able to get online...(display is still bad) and go to emachine.com..did all that installed their drivers for the display did what they said and it made my display skinny and shaky and unreadable again. SO I undid what I had just done, and went to the talk live with the tech guy...lol what a joke...He takes control of my computer, tells me he knows what the problem is, blah blah blah...so I sit and watch him remotely try to fix my computer. He did the exact same thing I had just done, (that didn't work), and then he said he needed to restart my machine, and said it was fixed....um......NO..it's not! I am however up to 32bits of color with my resolution set to 800x600. but my monitor image is still small and color is still crappy. My monitor image size is now 12.5 and 9.4 I have a 17 inch monitor!!!! I will not allow me to adjust this at all.............so now that you know all of that.....what do I do now???
Thank you for your time.

[kiosk]

I'm not sure, but this sounds like a cooked video card to me, or a failing flyback transformer in the monitor.

When you say "garbled", do you mean garbled like; random pixels being in wrong colors, various color blotches and text popping up everywhere, or "garbled" in sense that the picture gets uniformly smeared across the screen, gets skewed, or gets jumpy like it's being "tugged" to one side?

First would indicate a video card failure, the second one would be monitor failure.

[mjc]

Right click on the desktop, go to properties and then Settings...Advanced...List all Modes (or similar) and then change it to something like 72 or 85 Hz.

[dragonsdagger07]

picture gets uniformly smeared across the screen, gets skewed, or gets jumpy like it's being "tugged" to one side? yes it does this and I tried changing the hertz thingy and it made it worse on each setting. it is set on 60 herts and is holding its on..the screen isn't jumping and shaking . I'm going to go with the bad video card....now how do I tell what kind I have and what kind to get?







I'm not sure, but this sounds like a cooked video card to me, or a failing flyback transformer in the monitor.

When you say "garbled", do you mean garbled like; random pixels being in wrong colors, various color blotches and text popping up everywhere, or "garbled" in sense that the picture gets uniformly smeared across the screen, gets skewed, or gets jumpy like it's being "tugged" to one side?

First would indicate a video card failure, the second one would be monitor failure.

[pentachris]

If there's a problem with the monitor, or if the refresh rate is set to something your monitor can't display properly as mjc alluded to, the guy on the other end of the remote desktop may not be able to see the problem.

I would've thought that setting it to 60 Hz would be safer than 72 or 85 (but worse on your eyes), but mjc is more experienced than me, so try his suggestion.

[mjc]

On 14-15 in monitors and smaller (13) 60 Hz is the way t go. Some 15 and most 17 in 72 is it (85 is some 17 and most 19...).

The other thing to try would be to find the manufacturer's drivers, not the eMachines' ones.

[saphalline]

To be certain it's not just your monitor, try a different one on your computer. Also, try your monitor on another known-working computer.