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Weird screen jitter (with photos)

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First post, by dada

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Hi there,

So I've been setting up a retro pc, and now I'm nearly done with it. Just a few more things that have to be taken care of. One is a pretty strange issue: the screen seems to be a little jittery at times.

It seems to be correlated with HDD access. When installing something that has a lot of small files, the screen is pretty much constantly jittering. But when I was extracting a RAR file with lots of larger files inside earlier, the effect could only be seen for a short time every couple of seconds.

I made some photos that illustrate the problem (making pictures of a CRT is pretty difficult and the jitter happens at such a high speed it's hard to capture, so they're pretty bad)

jitter_1.jpg
Part of the text in a repeating image displays a pattern - the text should be intact

jitter_2.jpg
Bottom right of the window displays some jitter

They might seem like really small/subtle effects but they happen pretty constantly and are pretty noticeable.

Anyone know what the problem could be? It's not the video card, since I replaced it earlier and even changed it into a different PCI slot. The problem was there too when using the old card. Also, it's not the monitor, since it's connected to two machines (it has an input selector) and the other one doesn't have this problem at all.

Reply 2 of 6, by megatron-uk

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It's sounds like rf interference when the disk is being accessed. Is there any possibility of swapping the power supply over to see if changes? You could also try to power the monitor and pc from seperate wall sockets too (if you have them on a shared power strip, for example).

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https://www.target-earth.net

Reply 3 of 6, by jwt27

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This is either capacitor failure, in the PSU or on your motherboard, or a grounding issue. Do you have your monitor and PC both plugged into a grounded wall socket?

Reply 6 of 6, by dada

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leileilol wrote:

hehe RPGMaker2000 RTP

Nice to see someone else remembers this 😀

Thanks for the suggestions, I'm going to give them a try soon!

megatron-uk wrote:

It's sounds like rf interference when the disk is being accessed. Is there any possibility of swapping the power supply over to see if changes? You could also try to power the monitor and pc from seperate wall sockets too (if you have them on a shared power strip, for example).

I've never swapped a power supply before, I suppose I can give that a try if everything else fails (it's an AT style computer, not sure if that matters with regard to buying a new one). I'll try putting the monitor in a different group. Actually, maybe it's because it's on a socket extender on a socket extender.

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