Odd display issue or psychosomatic?

[staringintotheabyss]

Rig:

Asus Rampage III Extreme Mobo
Intel 990x extreme CPU
GTX 580 GPU
12 Gigs of RAM (only 2 sticks recognized, so 8 gb functional, Ripjaw ram DDR3)
Windows 7 Professional 64 bit OS
Viewsonic VX2450 Series 1080p LED flat screen Monitor
1200 Quattro PSU
Antec 1200 v3 case
SSD drive (can't remember the exact make)
Firefox as primary browser

Issue: Perceived eye strain/font descrepency

Background: Basically, one night while drinking, flash player crashed randomly when I opened word pad to create a document. Immediately stickam (a site that requires flash) refused to display the chat/camera page and displayed the lettering "Flash Required" in its place. The page wouldn't load, but youtube videos would. Restarted, nothing. Uninstalled Firefox/Flash and reinstalled, stickam works again. I was a bit hammered at the time and due to having an old GPU crash on me in the past with subsequent display glitch, I became paranoid and I thought I saw a problem with the graphics and I decided to remove my GTX 580's Nvidia drivers and drunkenly install them off the manufacturers site (EVGA), which should be a non-issue since I hear they're the same drivers anyway.

Went a bit OCD with it, tinkered with resolution, settings, etc. got a bit obsessive. Next day I notice the screen is giving me some eye strain. Thinking it may be the EVGA drivers I do a clean driver uninstall (removed drivers through windows, restart, reinstall drivers) and installed the nvidia drivers (NOTE: The new drivers are 3 months ahead of my old 'Pre-Flash Player crash' ones).

Now I feel as if the screen is irritating my eyes. It's not really a proper "eye burn" but sort of like a foreign body sensation/strain issue. Looked up ghosting, glares, halo's, flickering, decided it wasn't any of those. Everything seems to have a street light at night type shine to it. I want to say I can semi-see a bit of a projection/slight halo when there's white lettering against a black background. Noticed that when I flip through the dates under the clock for a split second as they change they are semi pixelated then correct themselves as opposed to smoothly transitioning like they used to. the font definitely looks different on firefox with some fonts being too thin on certain edges, whereas it's more normal on Google chrome, however, it seems like even desktop font and images look "different".

Checked cord management and temps, phoned viewsonic tech support and did a memory recall/factory reset on the monitor as well as a "power dump" (unplug and hold the monitor power button down for 30 seconds), still the same. Tried monitor on a different computer and it seemed to improve. Font looked like it used to, and the month on the date/time transitioned smoothly when I flipped through them instead of the half a second of it pixelating in. Also tried tinkering with Cleartype to no avail.

Tinkered with the contrast/brightness. Increasing the brightness (as it seems I may have reduced it while drunk) has made it feel somewhat better (or my eyes are just adjusting to it). I notice now after I use the PC my nearsightedness is worse, my eyes are semi irritated/dry throughout the day, etc. This is all after that one flash player crash.

Had something similar happen before where the images felt too bright/sharp and I went out and replaced my 10 year old LCD with this current LED and my other GPU with the expensive GTX 580 and it went away. I find it hard to believe it's happening again and replacing high-end monitors/gpu's as a display fix is a pretty expensive resolution, if it's even one.

Not sure if this is just psychosomatic/anxiety related and I merely put in new drivers so my eyes need to adjust? This has happened on other rigs in the past with completely different parts/case, that's why I think it might be either in my head or a Windows 7 OS problem.

Photo of the date/time pixelation that happens during TRANSITION of changing the dates (it corrects itself in about half a second, I snapped the photo as it was pixelating in)

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/708/oddpixelateddate.png/


Image of how the text looks on facebook (the image quality is poor so I see some "blurs" on the image that don't appear on the screen, it's obviously sharper on the screen, however what I want to show you is the facebook "font" how it seems to have changed and become semi distorted in size, I have not changed my browser font size).

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/195/facebookfont.png/

Again I think this may just be an "all in the head type of thing" because this is the third time this has happened with multiple different rigs and it's always a "change in the graphics". As far as interference possibilities I have an extremely old power plug unit and 2 very old speakers but if they were going to give interference with the monitor they would have done it prior to all of this.

I really would appreciate some feedback on this, thank you

 

[iam2thecrowe]

maybe you should get your eyes checked. does your country offer good health care? got private health insurance with extras?

 

[staringintotheabyss]

I've thought about that but this didn't really happen until the crashing. One thing that's came to mind is that I've used a cleaner called monster screen cleaner. I've just recently looked at reviews for it and people are saying that it leaves massive waxy streaks. I put a flashlight (as they recommended) to my screen and I can see the streaks. Maybe this cleaner is the cause and ruined the previous monitor as well with enough use?

 

[joshyboy82]

links are broken, or maybe my eyes...

 

[staringintotheabyss]

First link with the date on the bottom right

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/708/oddpixelateddate.png/


Second link showing facebook

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/195/facebookfont.png/


Sorry about the broken links

 

[mactronix]

Lesson one never ever try and do anything no matter how many times you have done it before or how easy it is on a PC when drunk. Guess you got that already though. Been there done that

Well as i can see what you are talking about in the screen shots its not you and its not your screen cleaner because its taking a snap of the data and not an outside picture of the screen. So the issue is defiantly there.

A few things i know for a start.
Firefox has just gone to Version 7. I don't use it but other browsers auto update so has this happened ?
Did you mess with the DPI settings under Personal in the display settings area of the control panel ?

Personally i would un install the card and clear all the drivers and install the ones you were using before. I run ATI/AMD cards and always get the drivers from the AMD site, i would suggest you go to Nvidia for your drivers as some times there are extra things in third party drivers.
I went to XFX for mine once and it was a disaster [:lectrocrew:1]

Some of it is no doubt in your mind as you are now looking for things and probably giving yourself eye strain doing so.

If it looks better and works better in a different browser then use that one. I used Opera for ages but they auto updated it and it gave me huge graphical glitches so i switched to Chrome and have yet to look back.

Mactronix

 

[staringintotheabyss]

Lesson one never ever try and do anything no matter how many times you have done it before or how easy it is on a PC when drunk. Guess you got that already though. Been there done that

Well as i can see what you are talking about in the screen shots its not you and its not your screen cleaner because its taking a snap of the data and not an outside picture of the screen. So the issue is defiantly there.

A few things i know for a start.
Firefox has just gone to Version 7. I don't use it but other browsers auto update so has this happened ?
Did you mess with the DPI settings under Personal in the display settings area of the control panel ?

Personally i would un install the card and clear all the drivers and install the ones you were using before. I run ATI/AMD cards and always get the drivers from the AMD site, i would suggest you go to Nvidia for your drivers as some times there are extra things in third party drivers.
I went to XFX for mine once and it was a disaster [:lectrocrew:1]

Some of it is no doubt in your mind as you are now looking for things and probably giving yourself eye strain doing so.

If it looks better and works better in a different browser then use that one. I used Opera for ages but they auto updated it and it gave me huge graphical glitches so i switched to Chrome and have yet to look back.

Mactronix

Thank you for the response I was wondering, how do I go about properly uninstalling the card/drivers? Usually I just find the card in device manager, delete it, restart, then put the new drivers in. I either do that, or hit "uninstall drivers" in Windows 7 and the restart and put the new ones in. Do I actually need to pull the card out of the mobo and is there some type of cleaner or proper way to get the drivers out other than the method I've used?

I checked DPI and it's still set to 60 (max), it has something like 60, 59, 59, 25 interlaced, 25 interlaced. Firefox is a newer version, I know that because I redownloaded after the flash player crash. While font looks "normal" in Google chrome compared to firefox, everything has this sort of "street light at night" shine to it that makes it an eyesore after awhile.

 

[mactronix]

Some people use CC cleaner which is a free download but i never have. Personally I run the AMD uninstaller, do Nvidia have something similar ? then check for anything left in programs then delete the folder/s the drivers were in. Empty the trash bin and restart the PC.
If everything is done right it usually comes back at a default setting like 600 x 800 until i install the new drivers.
Obviously its best to have the drivers already downloaded and waiting on the desktop for ease of access.

Mactronix

 

[staringintotheabyss]

Update: So I upgraded my firefox to firefox 7, this successfully fixed the font problem with firefox, however, font in general seems to "stand out" more and it's not easy on the eyes as it used to be about 5 days ago. There's still this odd "shine" to the screen that's creating halo's. Not actual halo's that come out in pixels/artifacts but a sort of halo glow to every border/letter. I also noticed that when viewing pictures the quality is significantly less. Pictures that used to be crisp and HD now appear very grainy and even looking at myself in the webcam my shirt (which I've wore on cam before) has a grainy appearance with diminished quality on cam (likely not my camera but part of my display issue as I can view these pictures as they used to be on my iPhone).

I did a clean driver uninstall (wiping any remnants of them out through deleting folders etc.) and reinstalled the drivers directly from the EVGA CD that came with my GTX 580 (the NVIDIA drivers off the site weren't helping). The date still displays the same temporary pixel distortion when switching the dates, instead of swiftly flying to the new date like before it sort of "pixelates in" in pieces to form the whole (this did not occur when I used the monitor on the other PC). I'm going to attempt to reformat to see if it might be a Windows display issue.

Any chance this could be mobo/ram/cpu related? I'm trying to rule things out.

Thanks

 

[staringintotheabyss]

It seems I fixed this by reformatting, likely a driver error but I found that it might be a bug with Windows 7 when you have a large screen monitor and change the resolution, the resolution never truly recovers, I just won't mess with desktop resolution anymore.