Brett Rants

Unicorns & Graphic Cards

What do Unicorns and Graphic Cards have in common?

Do words describe the sinking feeling one gets when their computer goes down, so much life, so much effort, so much of what I care about is digital, and suddenly, the ship is adrift, without anchor, a gaping hole in its side, taking water, or whatever metaphor you wish to use, I do not like the feeling, and even now, weeks later, there is a certain level of distrust, a lack of confidence all will be well, all will start up without incident, and then that feeling will go away... until there is cause for it to return

I bought a new computer recently... well, a newly refurbished one. And when I turned it on, the screen flickered. This was sort of annoying, as the old computer died (or so I shall claim) due to a malfunctioning graphics card.

Anyhow, there is a maxim.

When you hear hooves, think horses... not unicorns.

Long story short, in response to the flicker (or whatever you want to call the above), lots of online help talked of reseating graphics cards and/or reinstalling drivers (both things I did not want to do). But the advice that worked, and which was buried deep down in the search stack, was to reduce the refresh rate (from 60hz down to 40hz) and the problem was solved (my vintage computer was simply not robust enough to handle the latest OS -- Win 10 -- running at full speed).

Horses, not Unicorns: the easy fix often works.

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And for everything else, try turning your rig on and off a few times (works a good 90% of the time in my experience).

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