Odd graphical effects on screen

Zerokku

Randomly (And I mean randomly) I seem to get some graphical errors to appear on my screen. Out of nowhere I may sometimes get a group of random grey pixels to appear, usually on my taskbar and near the address bar of the browser. Happens maybe once every other day or so. Don't think its something with my GPU since all I have to do to eliminate the pixels is simply mouse-over them, but I am wondering what it may possibly be.

ronya

Take a screenshot and post it?

Stormwatcher

do you have on board video, to test the issue? How recent are your drivers?

Dedian

Have you cleaned out your computer recently? Aside from a driver issue, this sounds like random graphical artifacts that are caused by a failing or overheating vid card. They're usually all sorts of colors, but anything random like that would lead me to check the video hardware and heat. Couldn't hurt to run memtest on it, just in case.

Zerokku

ronya wrote: »

Take a screenshot and post it?

Will do next time I see it.

Stormwatcher wrote: »

do you have on board video, to test the issue? How recent are your drivers?

Completely up to date

Dedian wrote: »

Have you cleaned out your computer recently? Aside from a driver issue, this sounds like random graphical artifacts that are caused by a failing or overheating vid card. They're usually all sorts of colors, but anything random like that would lead me to check the video hardware and heat. Couldn't hurt to run memtest on it, just in case.

I was thinking that, except for the whole "I can mouse over them and they disappear thing." Seems like some sort of graphical glitch than artifacts because from my understanding they wouldn't disappear like that.

Edit: Also this is a gaming computer and I never run into any graphical problems when running games or anything. This only ever appears on the desktop.

ronya

Yeah, it's not likely to be hardware. Are you on Windows or Mac? Windows's window manager sometimes fouls up and does this; if you have some setup that makes it foul up a lot then you'll observe this more often.

Zerokku

ronya wrote: »

Yeah, it's not likely to be hardware. Are you on Windows or Mac? Windows's window manager sometimes fouls up and does this; if you have some setup that makes it foul up a lot then you'll observe this more often.

Windows 7 64

Sounds like this could be it. The pixels are very steam-ish colors. Maybe my constant alt-tabbing out of steam is causing some wackiness.

Rothgarr

It sounds like something my Mac does, too, sometimes. In the top right menu bar instead of showing the boinc icon (for SETI) it will show a grey square. If I mouse over the square it fixes itself.