Hope someone can help with this. I have installed Vista Ultimate 64-bit on a brand new computer. I am using ViewSonic VX924 19" LCD @1280x1024 and 32bit colour. When I am displaying the desktop the monitor will blink off for about 3 seconds every 20-minutes or so When I am displaying a web page on the Internet, the monitor is stable as long as the browser is NOT minimized When I attempt to play a game (e.g.: COD4, SpellForce, Civilization, etc), except for the builtin Nvidia/game developer ads, the monitor will display for 1-second, blank off for 3 to 5 seconds - always. This makes game play virtually impossible. When I look at some logs, the games are sending requests to the Desktop Windows Manager. I am not running Aero. I am running Vista Basic theme. I have changed to Windows Classic - same problem. I have attempted to disable the Desktop Windows Manager with the "net stop uxsims" command - I get security violation error. Any ideas? Thanks
If you have access, try a different monitor. No or same problem, strip of the graphics drivers completely. Re-load. Choose "Adjust for best Performance" Under Performance settings, which is in advanced system settings, in system properties. - Even tho you've turned to windows classic, the animation effects are still on. Sounds like a driver issue, but could also be monitor or graphics card (stated in order of liklyness).
actually that reminds me of an older nvidia problem where right clicking a movie file would make the screen flicker. It was checking for a second monitor so you could select the option (play this movie on screen 2) or something to that effect. Perhaps there is some Nvidia feature enabled that is causing this. To help you any more i'd need to know what graphics card you have and what Nvidia Driver version you are running.
Agreed. This sounds very much like a graphics adapter driver problem. Try completely removing the drivers (or just uninstall in first instance) and then get the latest from Nvidia.com and install those.
I just reread and was also reminded of a somewhat similar problem I had a while back. I use Litestep as a shell instead of the regular explorer.exe but Litestep had it's own Windows Desktop Manager and it seemed to interfere while playing games sometimes to the point where the game would just minimize and stay that way until I stopped Litestep. The problem has since been fixed.. but makes me think that Desktop Windows Manager may be the culprit. You may need to log in as administrator or just disable it from the startup/services and reboot. I can't be too sure of how to do any of that since i don't have vista. (I don't plan on switching over. ever...)
