Podcast: Play in new window | Embed
Harry asked: “We’ve gone through about 10 monitors and we’ve got a real problem. The text jumps around on the screen, or the text takes too long to load on the monitor itself. What is the problem? Is it a bad monitor? Or a bad graphics card? There’s got to be a reason no monitor has worked on this thing. At least the last 10 that we tried. Taking another one back tonight.”
Harry, if 10 monitors in a row are showing the exact same symptoms, and they’re all new enough that you can take them back to the store… it’s not the monitors.
You can stop buying monitors and start looking at other causes, at the top of the list will be that graphics card you mentioned. It’s very likely that there’s something wrong with yours.
For the price of one of those monitors, you can probably buy a replacement car to test out. You’re already familiar with the returns process anyway, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get the card to the store if it doesn’t work.
Before you try that, you should at least try to update your current graphics card’s drivers, it may all stem from a software issue that may be resolved already.
There was really no reason to believe it could be the monitor after the second or third you discarded.