Missing letters - video problem

[cgonzo]

I am working on a Dell Inspiron laptop. The problem is the icons and menu names are incomplete. It might say "Ro" for Roxio or "In" for Internet Explorer. When I mouse over the menu or highlight the icon, the full names appear. I can eliminate the problem by going to MSConfig and selecting "/BASEVIDEO" under the boot.ini and rebooting. Then I am stuck at a really bad screen resolution. I suspect it may be bad video drivers or the video chip is dying. Any suggestions?

[CCT]

Have you played with your text size settings under View ?

You can also right click the screen (desktop), and go to properties , appearance , Font size.

OR, you can do that BUT goto settings and change the dpi.

[Platypus]

This is usually a video driver problem, first try installing current video drivers from Dell.

Although we have a system at work with a TNT2 video card that has always dropped occasional letters, and sometimes part or complete words are the wrong colour, and it doesn't seem to matter which driver version is installed. Highlighting them as you've found brings them back to normal.

[cgonzo]

I feel dumb for asking, but... I went to dell's site and they have both display drivers and video adapter drivers. What's the difference?

[Platypus]

Video adaptor drivers are the ones for your video "card" (chip), display drivers are for the screen. The video adaptor drivers are the ones to update.

Although there'd be no harm updating the display drivers too, they just tell the video driver what modes (resolutions etc) the screens available for that model work in.

[cgonzo]

Thanks for the advice. I updated everything and still had the error condition. The only solution I found was to disable the hardware acceleration. Display looks fine now.