Monitor goes black at certain specific times (ie: loading webpage)

[morikal]

Computer:

Running windows XP Pro off a <1 year old SATA harddrive, 2 GB PC2-8500 RAM (corsair twinx)
PSU is a OCZ GameXtream 700W, about a year old
Graphics: 7950 GX2 by EVGA, about a year old
Core 2 E6600


A few days ago I installed nvidia drivers 163.71 (was using 162.18 without problem for a while)
(I uninstalled old drivers, reboot to safe mode, run driver cleaner pro, reboot normal & install new driver)

I started seeing graphical artifacts in games, and nhancer reported it couldn't read the profile XML file for the 163 driver (claimed there was an error in the XML file... I took a look at the line it indicated and it was valid XML, so I'm not sure what was going on). I tried reinstalling the driver. When uninstalling it, I got an error (memory access violation or something similar) right after uninstall (by nwiz)

Now, I still have artifacts (basically, shadows flicker weird).
Yesterday, my monitor started going blank for a few seconds, then coming back up. This would happen when I open my web browser, navigate to a new page, switch tabs in my browser....

I also had a BSOD caused by my video driver DLL (NV4_DISP.DLL) when trying to start up a game.

My thought is that it is the power supply, but it is odd that it started right when I installed the new driver (I tried installing the old one again... still had same graphical artifacts in character shadows in more than one game, all on the Source engine... non-source games didn't have artifacts that I saw)

Anyone know of anything I can try other than the PSU?

 

[jaguarskx]

Sounds like a bad install. Try using Driver Cleaner Pro 1.5, it's the last free version:

DriverCleanerPro v1.5 (free)

It should be able to remove all video drivers. You may need to run it in Win XP "safe mode" if it cannot remove all the drivers in "standard mode" (i.e. a normal boot up).

 

[morikal]

I did use driver cleaner pro v1.5, and I have done a total of 4 reinstalls (3 of 163, and 1 where I tried going back to 162 without a change in the artifacts, in all of them I used driver cleaner 1.5 from safe mode)

Update: I checked all the plugs to my UPS unit, and while none of them seemed loose, now I don't get the blackout with the monitor, but hellgate london freezes during character creation, which would indicate some problem still occurring (I had no problem during beta hellgate).