Strange stuff in DECW

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

AS500 with VMS 7.3.
Station rebooted this morning and shows series of 2 points like this all over the screen. Starting from the window in which it says decw starting up (so also the login window and cde).

..
.. .. ..
.. ..
.. ..
.. ..

I tried power cycle. No luck. It stays.
KEA!X on PC can start a session on the station that look normal. Nothing changed on the station (did a dir to be sure).

Any idea ?

Wim

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

BTW : the points are very light grey.

Wim

[Willem Grooters]

Either your video card is broken, or the screen itself - or the connection between the two. I don't think there is something rotton within DecWindows since the Xserver on your PC works fine.

To find out: exchange the monotor. If the problem persists, the video might be broken, if not, it's the old monitor.

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Replaced screen and cables. Same reaction.
Used decw instead of cde. Idem.

Must be the graphics card.

Wim

[Edwin Gersbach_2 · Accepted solution]

Wim,

this seems to be kind of an aging problem.

A few month ago I suddenly had the same problem with my AS500. After switsching cables and monitors (mine is dual screen) I went to the cellar and removed 3 cards from stored systems. One had ten time as much bad dots, another had slightly more and the third one was about the same.

As we no longer have them under contract and I don't want to open another douzend boxes to eventually find a good card, I have to live with this.

Edwin

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Thanks. We are lucky and have lots of half broken stations around. I'll see to replace the card.

Wim

[Willem Grooters]

If AS500 has a PCI bus and your requirements are not too high, you can look for rather cheap cards like S3TRIO64 or Permedia2 (Both supported by VMS). Higher demand meand higher price. Take care for some mid-level and high-end cards, their driver may require EV6 processor (The driver for 3DLabs Oxygen VX1 for instance, at least, 2 years ago))