Graphic card question

[persius]

Yesterday I started to notice some issues when attempting to play movies on my PC and then when I attempted to launch an online game. My screen started to "snow" and the movie froze. I tried various players i.e. media player & VLC etc. and the same static appeared. In fact, my PC froze and I had to reboot. A message appeared at the bottom right of the screen (screen shot attached). I deleted my graphic driver and reinstalled the latest version thinking that would resolve the problem but sadly it didn't.

I'm able to watch youtube videos & streaming videos without any issues and I can open image files without any problems either. The only issues that I have noticed are video files & the game I have. In fact, playing around with some movies I have, I did notice that when I played the movie and maximized the window the movie played flawlessly and I was able to pause, FF and stop & start etc. The problem surfaces when I attempt to adjust the movie window size by manually changing the size on my monitor. When I click "start" on the movie it opens and plays perfectly. The "snow" & system freeze only manifests when I try to incrementally resize the video window.
Today, I opened a Word doc. and the same "snow" effect appeared briefly and then disappeared. I also tried to start a video with VLC player and it froze my PC immediately.

I have done all the troubleshooting I can think of and I'm now suspecting it may be a virus but before resorting to a reformat I wanted to see if there may be some other issue/s that I have overlooked. If anybody has any thoughts to share I would appreciate hearing from you.


Thank you.

 

[TechnoMage]

You said that you've "done all the troubleshooting you can think of".

At least once a year, I'll have some weird video problem on one of my PC's.
One thing seldom mentioned is that removable video cards are very sensitive to dirt contamination. And since they have to plug in to a socket on the motherboard, those contacts are very subject to contamination too. Both on the card itself, and on the Motherboard.
So what I do at the first sign of a video problem is take out my video card and clean it. In the worse case, I'll wash the card, mostly the ram, with soap and water, using an old tooth brush to scrub around the ram chips. Then a warm water rinse, followed by a Denatured Alcohol rinse, and then a thorough drying. That almost Always fixes my video problems.

Also, I've saved hundreds of sticks of RAM (over the past 40 years) that tested BAD, by just washing it, using the above mentioned technique.

Happy Computing!
TechnoMage