Computers monitor going funny

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Originally Posted by Denman

its bout 2 years old , 1 ghz athalon, gf4 ti4600, 512 ram, asus motherboard (cant remember what one exactly) 1x60gb hd,
It happens from certain games only, and ive just thought that it seems to be games using openGL (Jedi acedemy, Medal of Honour).....
It has been getting faster reboot now, as i had a spybot, and i couldn't remove, and it had trouble booting into safe mode .. . . .
but thats gone ,so its more like 3-4 mins now ...

Well that still seems a little long unless you are loading an unusual amount of software for immediate use. MS Office for instance likes to load little bits of itself at bootup.
I have come across spyware that interferes with video cards. I have an old ATI Wonder card and a particularly bad spy program changed it's display size and interfered with Norton. If you haven't run it yet, downlaod a copy of Adaware and Spybot search and destroy. Make sure you downlaod the latest updates as well. Between the two of these, they will find and remove all spyware. A whirring hard drive during boot and when you are not doing anything is a sure sign that somebody is getting info from your computer.
The most nasty ones I have found are related to Gator and download with Kazaa. Once you have scanned your computer look for files and folders containing Gator and anything that reports as Gain Publishing, the author/distributor and make sure you remove it. You may find install files for these programs in multiple locations on your hard drive.
I am not a fan of formatting the drive and starting over, with me it's the principle of the thing.