The problem I eventually describe here is always too short-lived to get a photo or a video of it, so I'll try to explain it. First, I need to explain what happened on the day of my big upgrade because I think it's the culprit but I have no easy way to know for sure. I could re-build my old system, but that would be quite a project.
In April 2021, I upgraded to this: The Big Upgrade There are only 2 things inside the system that came from the old one: my sound card and my graphics card. I think maybe the 3 TB hard drive came from it too, but let's move on.
A part of the setup consists of two surge suppressors: one under my desk at my feet that I consider to be my secondary surge suppressor, and another that I consider to be the main one right next to my system. I have a floor lamp, my monitor, and my speaker system plugged into the secondary surge suppressor is plugged into the main one. Here's one photo I took on the day of the upgrade that shows the location of the main surge suppressor with the plug for the secondary one circled with an arrow pointing at the circle:
![Electrical wiring Electronic instrument Audio equipment Gas Computer hardware]()
I had to move that main surge suppressor out of my way to put the system here. I simply grabbed it by the end where those gold connectors are and swiveled it out of my way so that it was much more parallel with the wall. After setting the system down and getting it exactly where I want it, I moved the surge suppressor back to this spot and proceeded to connect everything into the back of the system.
After making sure I plugged everything in securely, I turned my PSU on and then I pressed the power button on the case and I sat down and waited, but my monitor remained off. So I looked at the motherboard's diagnostic LEDs only to find they were indicating a graphics card problem. So I began trying to figure it out. There was a point where I was once again on my hands and knees next to my system with the surge suppressor swiveled out of my way again and suddenly out of the corner of my right eye I saw a ton of bright flashes that lit up the area above my desk top. That whole space lit up like a strobe light turned on and it lasted for just a few seconds.
I was still on my hands and knees motionless wondering what just happened and it dawned on me that it had to have come from my monitor. So yeah, I was like "Oh crap...."
I began a nightmarish process of swapping out the graphics card with my old one only to find I had the same problem: no signal, my monitor remained off and the motherboard's diagnostic LEDs remained unchanged. I put the graphics card you see in the photo back into the system and sat down to see if I could think of what might be causing this.
As I was on my hands and knees for like the 4th or 5th time, I finally discovered the secondary surge suppressor wasn't plugged in all the way; it was just BARELY plugged in, resulting in no power to the secondary surge suppressor and so also no power to the monitor unless I gently touched the secondary surge suppressor's plug, which also made my monitor flash again. Facepalm. Then I finally noticed my floor lamp was off. lol Good lord. That should have been my clue, but I was in Panic Mode.
So I pushed the plug all the way in and then everything looked fine, except for this problem I'm about to describe.
At various times, parts of some windows (relatively small like the size of a business card to extremely large parts where it's almost the entire window) will become black or white, usually black. It doesn't happen to just any window though, just specific ones: Firefox, or when I'm streaming a video in Amazon Prime (never when watching a downloaded video, just streaming), or Peace Equalizer, or Microsoft Outlook 2016 (from Office 2016), and now sometimes in Spark Desktop (an email app that I tried just for fun and now I love it), etc. The Taskbar also has a strange visual glitch problem where sometimes some of the Taskbar elements will change to a different shade of its color until I force a redraw in one way or another (like just doing a mouseover or opening the hidden icons menu). Like sometimes mousing over a Taskbar button will result in the Taskbar button still looking like my mouse is over it. Sort of. Then mousing over it again fixes it due to the redraw.
What I tried:
I forgot to say too that on the day of the big upgrade when I discovered the secondary surge suppressor wasn't plugged in all the way, I tested my system with some games to see if my system was damaged. Prior to the big upgrade, I was in the middle of going through the Watch Dogs campaign, so I started with Watch Dogs and within seconds of trying to play, the signal became extremely scrambled and I think a few seconds later I got it to recover and then that was it: it never happened again, leaving me wondering why the signal got all messed up just one time like that. I kinda stopped playing video games a couple months later though because I was getting tired of feeling the obvious bottleneck of my graphics card. lol (I was kind of all out of money after this upgrade). Still, during that time, I had no additional graphics problems in games that I can recall.
I don't know if the following is related, but a few months ago I discovered I lost the ability to download videos in Amazon Prime Video for Windows using the 'Best' setting inside of the Settings area. So I'm not talking about streaming. I can stream in Best quality all day (but as you may know, streaming in Best still gets you ugly compression while a downloaded video in 'Best' looks beautifully uncompressed), but if I try to download a video with the 'Best' quality selected in the Settings, it won't download. It just errors out after a few seconds. I can download in 'Better' quality though. Here's the thing: I don't know whether this is something they changed on their end and I'm just now realizing it or if it's related to this, but I was most definitely able to download in 'Best' quality before the upgrade just fine! You see, I went an extremely long time there with no interest in Amazon Prime Video, and I'm thinking that it's possible I lost that interest before the big upgrade, which would mean the first time I launched it since the day of the big upgrade would be just a few months ago. I tried to get help from Amazon on this, but no one can figure it out. They always tell me to try everything I already tried like checking to see if I'm running low on drive space or trying a different drive or re-registering my computer as a new device, etc. etc. etc, yada, yada, yada. They always get me to the point where I have to tell them that if this had such a simple solution, then I'd have easily solved it without any help. My system is the only one I can test Amazon Prime Video for Windows on, but I'd love it if I could easily get my old system up and running to see if my new system is at least a part of the problem. Again, getting it back up and running would be a bit of a project.
A few months after the big upgrade, I tried Windows 11 just out of curiosity, and strangely, the problem never occurred in Windows 11, except I think I still never even launched Amazon Prime Video for Windows in Windows 11. I think I had lost all interest in Amazon Prime Video for a super long time there. So the only thing I can be sure of is that somehow, Windows 11 didn't allow this problem of the partial blackouts or whiteouts to happen and the Taskbar never had any visual glitches like I described. Something about Windows 11 solved the problem. I came to hate Windows 11 after a few months though, so I went back to Windows 10 which brought back this problem just as it was before. So I can add that to the list of things I tried.
So now I'm wondering if this is just a problem with Windows 10. What do you think? I think I already tried toggling Settings > System > Display > Graphics settings > 'Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling' and 'Variable refresh rate' because I'm looking at those settings right now and remembering that I tried this already (and yes, I would have restarted my system after changing those settings). I tried everything I can think of. Y'know? I'm a techie. It's what I do when I encounter problems. However, this one is way beyond me. So I'm scared that maybe my motherboard or my CPU or my memory is messed up. I just have no way to know. The only way to be sure is by rebuilding my old system, which again would be a bit of a project that I don't want to get into. But then what if this is just the way AMD systems are in Windows 10? Yeah, I've also considered the possibility that maybe this is normal with AMD systems in Windows 10 because I've never had one before. So that's a part of what I'm asking here.
I apologize for how long this is, but I wanted to pre-answer all of the questions that I think would otherwise need to be asked. I guess where I'm at is, I think I want to know if this indicates a serious problem that I shouldn't be ignoring or if this is normal for AMD systems in Windows 10 or if it's something harmless and due to some Windows 10 setting I can change to work optimally with an AMD system. Sigh. I don't know. Or maybe it's something Microsoft did to Windows 10 and maybe this stuff started happening later than I remember, like maybe after Windows Update updated, which would've been 2 days after the big upgrade. I just don't know. I don't keep a journal. All I know is, I'd understandably love to solve this once and for all.
In April 2021, I upgraded to this: The Big Upgrade There are only 2 things inside the system that came from the old one: my sound card and my graphics card. I think maybe the 3 TB hard drive came from it too, but let's move on.
A part of the setup consists of two surge suppressors: one under my desk at my feet that I consider to be my secondary surge suppressor, and another that I consider to be the main one right next to my system. I have a floor lamp, my monitor, and my speaker system plugged into the secondary surge suppressor is plugged into the main one. Here's one photo I took on the day of the upgrade that shows the location of the main surge suppressor with the plug for the secondary one circled with an arrow pointing at the circle:
I had to move that main surge suppressor out of my way to put the system here. I simply grabbed it by the end where those gold connectors are and swiveled it out of my way so that it was much more parallel with the wall. After setting the system down and getting it exactly where I want it, I moved the surge suppressor back to this spot and proceeded to connect everything into the back of the system.
After making sure I plugged everything in securely, I turned my PSU on and then I pressed the power button on the case and I sat down and waited, but my monitor remained off. So I looked at the motherboard's diagnostic LEDs only to find they were indicating a graphics card problem. So I began trying to figure it out. There was a point where I was once again on my hands and knees next to my system with the surge suppressor swiveled out of my way again and suddenly out of the corner of my right eye I saw a ton of bright flashes that lit up the area above my desk top. That whole space lit up like a strobe light turned on and it lasted for just a few seconds.
I was still on my hands and knees motionless wondering what just happened and it dawned on me that it had to have come from my monitor. So yeah, I was like "Oh crap...."
I began a nightmarish process of swapping out the graphics card with my old one only to find I had the same problem: no signal, my monitor remained off and the motherboard's diagnostic LEDs remained unchanged. I put the graphics card you see in the photo back into the system and sat down to see if I could think of what might be causing this.
As I was on my hands and knees for like the 4th or 5th time, I finally discovered the secondary surge suppressor wasn't plugged in all the way; it was just BARELY plugged in, resulting in no power to the secondary surge suppressor and so also no power to the monitor unless I gently touched the secondary surge suppressor's plug, which also made my monitor flash again. Facepalm. Then I finally noticed my floor lamp was off. lol Good lord. That should have been my clue, but I was in Panic Mode.
So I pushed the plug all the way in and then everything looked fine, except for this problem I'm about to describe.
At various times, parts of some windows (relatively small like the size of a business card to extremely large parts where it's almost the entire window) will become black or white, usually black. It doesn't happen to just any window though, just specific ones: Firefox, or when I'm streaming a video in Amazon Prime (never when watching a downloaded video, just streaming), or Peace Equalizer, or Microsoft Outlook 2016 (from Office 2016), and now sometimes in Spark Desktop (an email app that I tried just for fun and now I love it), etc. The Taskbar also has a strange visual glitch problem where sometimes some of the Taskbar elements will change to a different shade of its color until I force a redraw in one way or another (like just doing a mouseover or opening the hidden icons menu). Like sometimes mousing over a Taskbar button will result in the Taskbar button still looking like my mouse is over it. Sort of. Then mousing over it again fixes it due to the redraw.
What I tried:
- I bought some new high-end DisplayPort cables.
- I tried the other DisplayPorts on my graphics card.
- I tried tons of different driver versions for my graphics card, always uninstalling and then going into Safe Mode to use DDU each time to start as fresh and as clean as possible
- I tried changing the monitor driver
- I once again tried some of my old graphics cards
- I uninstalled all of the AMD-specific drivers and reinstalled them one by one
- I tried moving my memory to the other slots, which is the only compatible memory I own
- I made sure the motherboard was set to its factory defaults. So, no overclocking of any kind or any other modified settings of any kind.
- I went through every last setting in the BIOS to see if maybe there was something I needed to change. Every setting I found that I thought might have some sort of an effect on this made no difference.
I forgot to say too that on the day of the big upgrade when I discovered the secondary surge suppressor wasn't plugged in all the way, I tested my system with some games to see if my system was damaged. Prior to the big upgrade, I was in the middle of going through the Watch Dogs campaign, so I started with Watch Dogs and within seconds of trying to play, the signal became extremely scrambled and I think a few seconds later I got it to recover and then that was it: it never happened again, leaving me wondering why the signal got all messed up just one time like that. I kinda stopped playing video games a couple months later though because I was getting tired of feeling the obvious bottleneck of my graphics card. lol (I was kind of all out of money after this upgrade). Still, during that time, I had no additional graphics problems in games that I can recall.
I don't know if the following is related, but a few months ago I discovered I lost the ability to download videos in Amazon Prime Video for Windows using the 'Best' setting inside of the Settings area. So I'm not talking about streaming. I can stream in Best quality all day (but as you may know, streaming in Best still gets you ugly compression while a downloaded video in 'Best' looks beautifully uncompressed), but if I try to download a video with the 'Best' quality selected in the Settings, it won't download. It just errors out after a few seconds. I can download in 'Better' quality though. Here's the thing: I don't know whether this is something they changed on their end and I'm just now realizing it or if it's related to this, but I was most definitely able to download in 'Best' quality before the upgrade just fine! You see, I went an extremely long time there with no interest in Amazon Prime Video, and I'm thinking that it's possible I lost that interest before the big upgrade, which would mean the first time I launched it since the day of the big upgrade would be just a few months ago. I tried to get help from Amazon on this, but no one can figure it out. They always tell me to try everything I already tried like checking to see if I'm running low on drive space or trying a different drive or re-registering my computer as a new device, etc. etc. etc, yada, yada, yada. They always get me to the point where I have to tell them that if this had such a simple solution, then I'd have easily solved it without any help. My system is the only one I can test Amazon Prime Video for Windows on, but I'd love it if I could easily get my old system up and running to see if my new system is at least a part of the problem. Again, getting it back up and running would be a bit of a project.
A few months after the big upgrade, I tried Windows 11 just out of curiosity, and strangely, the problem never occurred in Windows 11, except I think I still never even launched Amazon Prime Video for Windows in Windows 11. I think I had lost all interest in Amazon Prime Video for a super long time there. So the only thing I can be sure of is that somehow, Windows 11 didn't allow this problem of the partial blackouts or whiteouts to happen and the Taskbar never had any visual glitches like I described. Something about Windows 11 solved the problem. I came to hate Windows 11 after a few months though, so I went back to Windows 10 which brought back this problem just as it was before. So I can add that to the list of things I tried.
So now I'm wondering if this is just a problem with Windows 10. What do you think? I think I already tried toggling Settings > System > Display > Graphics settings > 'Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling' and 'Variable refresh rate' because I'm looking at those settings right now and remembering that I tried this already (and yes, I would have restarted my system after changing those settings). I tried everything I can think of. Y'know? I'm a techie. It's what I do when I encounter problems. However, this one is way beyond me. So I'm scared that maybe my motherboard or my CPU or my memory is messed up. I just have no way to know. The only way to be sure is by rebuilding my old system, which again would be a bit of a project that I don't want to get into. But then what if this is just the way AMD systems are in Windows 10? Yeah, I've also considered the possibility that maybe this is normal with AMD systems in Windows 10 because I've never had one before. So that's a part of what I'm asking here.
I apologize for how long this is, but I wanted to pre-answer all of the questions that I think would otherwise need to be asked. I guess where I'm at is, I think I want to know if this indicates a serious problem that I shouldn't be ignoring or if this is normal for AMD systems in Windows 10 or if it's something harmless and due to some Windows 10 setting I can change to work optimally with an AMD system. Sigh. I don't know. Or maybe it's something Microsoft did to Windows 10 and maybe this stuff started happening later than I remember, like maybe after Windows Update updated, which would've been 2 days after the big upgrade. I just don't know. I don't keep a journal. All I know is, I'd understandably love to solve this once and for all.
So thank you, thank you, thank you!
