PLEASE HELP! Rectangular blue and yellow bars appear randomly on my monitor, especially when playing video!

When was the last time you updated your video driver?  

Post back with your computer model the version of windows you are running and if possible the video card in your system

My computer is an XPS Dimension 410 that I bought in 10-2006. I am running Windows XP, but it is possible that it is XP SP1 or XP SP2. It was what Dell sent me, and I only updated it through Windows the one time and then got this problem. I am sorry, but I am not computer-literate enough to know how to find out what video card I have. When I searched through Device Manager for anything related to the monitor, all I found was that the monitor is a Gateway VX1120 on NVidia GeForce7300LE. I hope this can help you help me!

I tried to update the driver this morning, but Dell gives a list of 17 drivers and I don't know what I need. I downloaded the two that were marked as urgent and I believe I installed those successfully. I double-clicked the downloaded file and it seemed to install, though it did not correct the problem.

Thanks so much!

I am so excited to try this, and regardless if it works or not, I cannot thank you enough!! One problem...I downloaded the driver fine, but the driver sweeper does not download. Instead, it says that it is discontinued and therefore the download links do not work. Should I try and find this program elsewhere?

Please edit your post to remove your service tag as that is a security issue. OK so you have a fairly old video card and ti may just be going.  

HERE is the latest driver for the card. 

Now here is how you should try to updated the driver.

Download and install Driver sweeper. But do not run it.

Save the Nvidia driver to your desktop to find it easily.

open the Add/remove from Control Panel and uninstall the Nvidia graphics driver.

The system will ask you to reboot. Go ahead but boot into Safe Mode. Tap the F8 key when you see the Dell splash screen and select the Safe mode option.

Once the computer has booted into safe mode Run Driver Sweeper. Select the option to clean the Nvidia GRAPHICS driver and nothing else. Be careful that is the only Nvidia option you select.

Once you have run the Driver Sweeper go ahead and reboot the computer back into normal windows. Once at the desktop run the Nvidia driver.

If after doing all this you are still experiencing the same issues you might want to think about getting a new video card.

try HERE

Great! Ok, now I installed the driver sweeper and am ready to proceed. My last question (I hope) is that in the list of programs to add/remove, it shows Nvidia Drivers. It does not specify a "Graphics" driver. Do I want to uninstall the Nvidia drivers? If not, how do I find only the Graphics driver?

yes the nvidia drivers are the ones you want to uninstall

Hi,

Well, after all that it didn't work. I uninstalled the nvidia drivers and then when I went into safe mode to run the sweeper, I got a pop up that said "Unhandled exception has occurred in your application. If you click Continue, the application will ignore this error and attempt to continue. If you click Quit, the application will close immediately. The specified registry key does not exist." So, I clicked on Continue and it seemed to run ok. It was still running this morning, ten hours later. There was no way to see if it was working, as there is no progress bar or anything. So, I assumed after 10 hours I got whatever out of it I could. I closed it and restarted the computer and installed the new driver. Upon rebooting it made all of the icons very tiny on the desktop and there were dozens of horizontal dash mark lines on the desktop. I had to use system restore to put me back to where it was. So, I still have the problem, but I still don't think it is a video card problem because it seems to be so random. I am really still hoping to find a solution. Did I do anything wrong? Do you have any other suggestions?  I am sorry to ask so much and be a pest, but quite frankly no one else has even had a clue about this issue.

Driver Sweeper should only take a few seconds to run not 10 hours.  Apparently, it is not running correctly or you have other system issues going on here.  You can skip Driver Sweeper and just uninstall the Nvidia Driver from your add/remove programs.  Do you run an Anti-Virus program?  Nvidia recommends temporarily shutting down your Anti-Virus program before installing their driver so there is no conflict and it installs correctly.   I would uninstall this driver again and re-install a different one like this one HERE.   The newer 200 series drivers can cause issues on some older systems with older video cards.   It is important to install all Windows critical updates.   If you are still running XP, you should really have SP3 installed.  For me, I don't recall ever having any problems after these updates.  Do you do the normal computer maintenance on a regular basis?  Have you ever taken out your 7300 LE video card and cleaned the dust off with a can of compressed air and re-seated the card?  Check your monitor cable also to make sure it is securely connected on both ends and working.  

Thanks so much for your reply! I'll download the driver from your link and attempt it again this evening. I am running Windows XP SP3. As for maintenance, because of this issue I had, and because of my desire to keep everything as close to the way Windows 95 ran, I never update Windows updates. The very few times I have, I have had some issues. I have my system set up to show everything in Windows Classic mode, and often when I try to update stuff it changes the preferences. So, I hesitate to update anything if it is working fine for me. I am just paranoid about potentially affecting the hard drive and losing data or changing a setting I have.

As for cleaning the card, I am not at all familiar with computer parts. I wouldn't even know what it looks like! If you think that physical dust could cause the issue I described, I'd be happy to try and clean it. In general, about once or twice a year I do open the case and blow the dust out. The issue seems to be virtually non-existent when I do things like visit websites, use MS Word, etc. But when I try to play video or use video phone services for example, it makes the screen virtually unreadable.

Video cards can overheat if they are covered with dust.  The video card doesn't have to do much just web surfing, but at other times when needed it will heat up and if it cannot keep cool due to dust, it could cause the problems described so it's worth the effort to clean it to see if it helps.   

Not installing Microsoft security updates would be a mistake in my opinion.  

Thank you. I will try this if I can figure out what the card looks like and where it is located in the housing. I have some screen shots of the problem I am experiencing, but there is apparently no way to post them here.