Monitor display poor until reboot

[MarkSyder]

Hi everybody.

The monitor in question is attached to a workstation running HP-UX 11.11. It was displaying flickering horizontal lines - occasionally I could make out parts of what it should be displaying.

Fairly certain this was a hardware fault, I was going to swap monitor with a different ws to see if the fault moved with the monitor or stayed with the ws. But I decided that a reboot was quicker and easier than moving a monitor so I tried that first. To my surprise, it seems to have cured the fault.

I've checked elm and the syslog, neither of which has anything untoward.

I suspect the graphics card - this workstation has been having other problems in recent months, with freezing when the user moves the mouse to get rid of the screen saver.

Am I right to suspect the graphics card or could there be another cause?

Mark Syder (like the drink but spelt different)

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

It would hurt nothing and only cost you time to run xstm cstm or mstm and run a hardware check. There may have been a one time problem here and the video memory became corrupted by a program that isn't written properly.

That would make it an application fault which may be best solved by getting current on patching and applications. A hardware fault will rear return and I think you are on a good path with your current assumption set.

SEP

[MarkSyder]

Great minds SEP!

I thought to myself "I'll run stm while I'm waiting for a reply". The graphics card failed every test and I'm about to put in a hardware call.

Thanks for the advice.

Mark