One evening, my monitor suddenly went completely white except for a black 1-centimeter square cursor that responded to mouse movement. A few days later, a similar thing happened. This time however, there were vertical bars and the square cursor was smaller. Shadow cursors appeared on the bars and tracked vertical mouse motion only. The black cursor followed the mouse in any direction. [ screenshot ]
I restarted the computer. Shortly thereafter, the phenomenon recurred. I took a photo. It happened to be *Friday the 13th* !
The following day, I was verifying this website's links. I clicked the World Championships link and the monitor abruptly displayed an alternating series of olive-green and black lines of varying thickness. [ screenshot ]
I restarted the computer and tried to repeat the behavior. On the first attempt, clicking English on the World Championships main page caused the computer to lock up. On the second attempt, clicking English resulted in a black screen and lock up. Note: this is with Internet Explorer; Netscape seems to work fine.
A subsequent virus scan turned up empty. I ran Scandisk (no errors) and defragmented the drive partition and now it works. However, on a *different* drive partition, it still locks up even today (12-May-2001) but no vertical lines or any variation of them have appeared since.
If you recall, my computer no longer does a Soft Power On. I discovered that this is not totally true. If I reboot into Safe Mode and then Shutdown, it does a Soft Off and I am able to press the Standby switch to Soft Power On.
