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One of my users has a problem I don't know how to fix. She'll log off of her account at night, leaving her computer on and the monitor as well. In the morning, when she comes into work she'll go to her PC to log in, but there's vertical lines on her monitor. We can't do anything at all with the PC, so we have to do a hard boot to get it to work again to where she can log in. This isn't really good, as we normally have our users leave their PCs on so that the anti-virus software we have can run.

Bottom line, why is this happening? What's causing it? The monitor is brand new (a Dell flat screen, 23" monitor). She's running Windows XP SP3.

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It sounds to me like the graphics card/chip in the machine is failing and you will need to replace it.

Before you do this, it may be worth trying to update the drivers just incase there is an issue.

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Yeah, that thought occurred to me, too, but I thought there might be something else so I thought it was worth asking. OK, I'll check on her machine and see if I can upgrade her video drivers. – Rod May 5 '11 at 15:54
Sometimes you can have a fail/bad hardware for ages, but working at less than it is intended e.g. small/low resolution, then suddenly by using new hardware where it needs to work hard, you find errors... I am finding an increasing amount of older graphics cards failing after upgrading to 1080p screens. – William Hilsum May 5 '11 at 16:29
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