Monitor or Graphics card problem?

[sean126]

My buddy has a HP AMD dual core computer that he bought at Best Buy last year. 15 inch monitor. The graphics are so-so to barely average at best when looking at pictures in the "my pictures" photo. The real problem is when he goes on line (with dial up) his graphics absolutely suck, big time! It's very pixelated...don't know if that's the correct word. You can actually see the square pixels in the pictures on the internet and any banners and such or beyond belief horrible.

I thought it might be the on board ATI graphics chip he has...I have never seen one this bad though. I've tried changing the settings in his monitor from "control panel" and...nothing. It's still slightly below average to horrible. The thing is....when I open, for instance, his HP photo program....theres a picture with a girl on there on the opening banner and it looks fine. Some pictures look slightly below average to almost fine and then others, like on the internet look like crap. So, it's not constant.

Would buying a graphics card solve his problem? That's the only thing I can think it could be. I could try bringing my monitor over there and hooking it up or bringing his monitor over to my house and hooking it up...if you think that might problem solve better.

[Stormcrow]

I would count out the monitor for now, if the monitor was going out you would definitely notice it. Try going to AMD's website and updating the drivers for the IGP, it sounds like a browser conflict when displaying images. Another would be to try another web browser to see if the problem is persistent over all of them. Download either Firefox, Opera, Netscape, SeaMonkey, or Konqueror, really any of those to check if the problem occurs. Updating Flash and Java Runtime Environment may help, but check the drivers and the browsers first. Also, some IGP's really only work well at a set resolution, you can play around with that to see if it helps.

[polobunny]

If you can try another monitor, do so first.
If the problem persist, re-installing the IGP drivers would be the next thing to do.

[sean126]

Thanks guys. I will try your suggestions and report back.

[Lead Head]

If his dial up has some kind of speed boost, AOL, NetZero, Netsapce, etc..They all compress the living snot out of pictures to make pages load faster. I noticed this when I was forced to use AOL Dial up, even viewing the same picture from the same site, the quality was vastly different. There is really noting you can do, unless you can turn off compression, which would slow things even further down.

[sean126]

Why yes....he does have that speed boost thing with netzero. He is getting broadband in about a month though.

[Lead Head]

Originally Posted by sean126

Why yes....he does have that speed boost thing with netzero. He is getting broadband in about a month though.

That would be it then! He should notice a definite image quality when he gets highspeed!