[SATLUG] ATI Garbage

[Andrew Sanders]

I've seen artifacts like you describe with old/flaky/dying video cards
of my own.  I have also heard of atrifacts like what you describe when
video cards overheat.  I'd guess that either your video card is slowly
dying or maybe your video card is overheating.  Maybe your machine has
poor air circulation (assuming it's in a desktop case) or has collected
enough dust so that it's running just hot enough to give you some
artifacts.

  It could be as simple as using some compressed air on the internals of
your case to get rid of some of the dirt/dust/debris.

-Andrew-

On Thu, 2007-11-29 at 11:19 -0600, Sean Carolan wrote:
> Recently my ATI video driver has been creating squares of garbage on
> my monitors.  I have dual displays, and the lower right corner of each
> display has some blocks over the task switcher.  Quite annoying
> because I can't see what's underneath the distorted pixels.  I also
> have a square thing that follows the mouse around.  It temporarily
> goes away if I jump to a terminal and back, but invariably returns to
> haunt me.
> 
> Has anyone else experienced distortions like this?  I'm pretty fed up
> with ATI graphics cards, and strongly recommend that anyone interested
> in using Linux do not give AMD/ATI a penny.  I never, ever have these
> problems with my Nvidia card at home.