Hi! Got an issue that's been haunting me for months now. Please, if somebody can figure this out, I'd really appreciate the help. Here's the deal.
I'm no expert in hardware, but I know some things. I decided to buy and assemble a new PC myself, so, among other things, I got an Asus P8Z68-V LE motherboard and a GTX 550 Ti card. The setup had been working fine, until the graphics cards started to behave in weird ways and one day stopped working. Of course, I began wondering what the problem was, and so, to test, I swopped cards with my friend who had some not-so-great Radeon. Turns out, his card works on my PC, and my card works on his PC. Puzzled, I settled for this configuration, since I didn't have money to buy another good graphics card, wasn't even sure what the problem was, and my i7 2600k had enough power to allow me to do everything I could do before, just slightly worse.
A week ago the ATI card suddenly stopped working. I just switched on the PC, and there was nothing. The onboard adapter was ok though. I tried different BIOS configurations, the other PCIE port - I thought it's either a broken card or a broken port - nothing helped. So I asked another friend to let me test with his hardware, and viola, same thing again: his nVidia card works on both PCs, my card only on his. Driven by a hunch, I swapped back with my first friend and got my GTX 550 Ti back. After a couple of hours and a few BSoDs, my old card started working again, and has been for a couple of days now. However, still the system was not so stable: sometimes I got "CPU Overheated" messages during boot, BSoDs, strange sounds etc, but not that often.
Now, I must say that I have 2 monitors: a smaller ASUS, and a huge Samsung TV. The TV is set as the primary monitor, extending onto the Asus. Suddenly, this happened: whenever I move the mouse pointer into the secondary desktop, the pointer is displayed in the top-left corner of it, and almost doesn't move. I can move the mouse around the desktop, open context menus with it where it would have been, trigger hover effects etc, but the displayed cursor stays in the corner. I can even move it back to the primary monitor, and then it disappears from the secondary one and behaves as supposed ont the primary one. If I use the Screen Resolution interface of Windows to switch them around and make the smaller one primary, the cursor remains crazy on the previously primary desktop (smaller one).
I uninstalled the drivers for the card; the system auto-installed them again, but the problem persisted. However, while without driver, the cursor goes back to normal. I played around with the settings in the NVIDIA Control Panel, and somehow, the cursor is now "invisible" on the larger monitor, so now I had to set the smaller one as primary. All this makes me think that it's not the DVI ports, not the mouse, not the monitors themselves, but the card.
Please, could someone tell me why my PC stops liking the different display adapters, and then starts liking them later on? How can I fix this and enjoy a stable experience for all the effort put into this blessed rig? Also, what's with the cursor thing, and how can I fix this, or at least use the large monitor again?
Thanks in advance.