I recently acquired a stock 8600/300 with 256 ram & 4 G HD. The computer came with OS 9.1 loaded but without disks. I played around with the unit for about a week before I did a clean install of 8.5 then upgraded to 8.6. The video was fine for the first week that I used it but just prior to installing 8.6 the cursor went crazy. It showed a long vertical line on the screen instead of a the standard cursor. This was a full line from top to bottom that move back and forth across the screen as I moved the mouse. I zapped the pram and got a normal cursor. It worked normally for a about an hour then the screen showed stationary vertical lines of a different color about 1/8 inch apart across the whole screen. Since the computer had been crashing fairly often with 9.1 I thought that might be the problem and installed 8.5 - 8.6. This did not solve the problem.
The vertical lines still show across the screen. Initially they were stable but now they fad in an out occasionally. The video acts as if it may be picking up some type of interference. The monitor is a NEC 17" Multisych attached to the built-in graphics port using a fixed (no switches) adapter. I tried a second NEC monitor that works fine on another computer and the lines appeared on it too. When I used the second monitor I made sure to run the video cable away from all the other cabling to avoid interference but that made no difference.
Try pulling the VRAM and reinserting it. It's possible it isn't making good contact and that is causing your problem. If you're not sure which is VRAM or just to be safe, pull each memory DIMM and reinsert it.
I have a different VGA adapter I will try tomorrow when I get back to the computer. Hopefully this should give me an indication whether the adapter is the culprit. In the mean time I have a couple of questions.
This is unlikely. Verticle lines especially imply video memory or video controller.
1. Does anyone have suggestions on other things for me to try?
2. I have a Rage 128 PCI video card from my B&W. Is there anyway for me to install that and use it as the video input for a single monitor? I know I can use it in conjunction with the built-in video to run two monitors, but can I use just the Rage card with a single monitor? Sorry for the long post.
Sure, just plug the monitor into it and leave the built in video un-connected.
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