0

It's hard to explain this problem so i'll provide plenty of pictures, just so you can see what's going on. Basically, the problem i'm facing is that i can see background applications when another application goes to full screen, or full-borderless-window mode (such as a game, movie) and other cases as well, such as video playback in a web browser (eg. on youtube either in full screen mode, or not).

To clarify more, the windows on the background needn't actually be on the background, they don't even need to be open at the time of playback. For example i regularly have my chrome web browser open, as well as the application Code::Blocks, as well as other windows explorer tabs, or Microsoft word etc.

I have been carefully gathering many "printscreens" and photos with my phone over the course of at least a month now just to seek help for this issue, because at first while googling i couldn't find anything. So i noticed that when taking these "printscreens" the background applications couldn't be seen in the image afterwards (by this i figured out how "printscreen" works - if you get my meaning). So i had to take all pictures with my camera, just to show you what i really see when i look at the computer screen.

In the pictures i will provide below these applications are always seen on the background (sometimes it's more subtle, other it's more obvious depending on the colors of the video/game on the foreground as well, which will make it more, or less obvious).

You can see the background upper right (its faint, note that this is a photo of a printscreen, scaled down in order to be uploaded here). The image below is from a youtube video i had on full screen. enter image description here

It's much more obvious in this one. This isn't even a movie, or video, or anything full screen. It's just chrome loading a pdf and on the background we can see other windows and words from my background apps. enter image description here

This is from a movie. I hope you can notice code from codeblocks here in the background, as well as other windows. enter image description here

And now that i have your attention i have to tell you that it gets much more weird than that. I have dual boot my windows 8.1 pc with ubuntu linux. These "background images" don't just appear on my windows 8.1 pc but on GRUB as well! Grub is a multiboot OS loader, which loads after uefi bios and gives me a screen where i have to select to enter either windows or ubuntu. You can see on the image below.

enter image description here

I hope you can see it (upper right more noticeable). The image that appears on GRUB is the last background applications i had open when i was in windows. Can you believe this?

The problem actually persists even after shutdowns, restarts etc ( i can see the last open windows i had the last time my windows operating systems was running). I haven't noticed this on my linux environment. I don't use ubuntu that much, but from the little i saw, i don't think linux is affected.

Anyway. It's strange enough as it is. I hope you understood the issue. If you didn't i can explain more. This becomes all the more annoying to me and i really don't know what it is, why it appears and how i can fix it. It's very bizarre. Anything you can do to help i would be grateful. Thanks in advance.

Improve this question
2
  • Have you tried a different monitor? It looks like an image has been burned into the screen. – Kaizerwolf Sep 26 '16 at 13:16
  • No, i don't have any other monitor. – KeyC0de Sep 26 '16 at 13:52
1

This looks to be a classic example of an image becoming burned into the screen. This can happen when you leave the monitor on for too long, let it get too hot, the monitor is going bad, anything could cause it.

While it's more common on older CRT screens, it's even possible on LEDs and liquid crystal and the like. The reason it won't show up on a print screen is that it's not truly being rendered by your computer's graphics processor; it's literally burned an image on to the monitor, hence why it shows on GRUB as well.

This happened to a friend of mine as well. His Dad is an avid lover of Dr. Mario for the Gamecube, and played it almost non-stop, while also leaving the TV on for extended periods of time while not playing. After a while, we started noticing that in other games, or on cable TV, good old Dr. Mario would still be standing there, silently judging us for playing crappy old PS2 games.

Improve this answer
4
  • wow. ok yes, i keep my PC on a lot lately yeah, about 10 hours each day. I close it regularly when i put it on sleep mode and i also turn off the monitor. But note that this background you saw is just one "image". It always depends on which applications i had open the last time my windows computer was running (and at which position they were exactly). I'm not sure about what you say about printscreens. So this is a monitor issue right (not a GPU one)? This is a hardware fault? wow ok. I can't believe this happened. – KeyC0de Sep 26 '16 at 13:49
  • Is there any way to fix it? Well it doesn't always appear. So perhaps the solution is to not have my PC and/or monitor enabled for so long. But this is something that i can't do right now. – KeyC0de Sep 26 '16 at 13:49
  • 1
    @RestlessC0bra If you can get access to another external monitor to test it, please do so. It would confirm whether or not the issue is indeed hardware related. As for print screen, what I mean is, print screen is a software thing. You take an snapshot of the GPU-rendered screen. Since this is an issue with the monitor, the snapshot will not grab the burned image on the monitor; you only see it in the print screen because the burned image is still on the monitor. – Kaizerwolf Sep 26 '16 at 14:11
  • Ah yes, that makes more sense now. Well, after reading and researching a bit i believe that this is indeed a screen burn-in and apparently, although now relatively rare in LCD, it definitely can occur (and yes it's not permanent on LCD's). Just now i unplugged my PC from the wall socket and left it out for 20 minutes, turned off my LED monitor as well (not removing it from wall outlet) and the background screen is gone. It will be back at some time, but at least i know what's going on. There are fixes etc on youtube. Thanks for enlightening me on this. I had no idea about it.Quite interesting. – KeyC0de Sep 26 '16 at 15:07

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.