weird monitor garbage on my new redhat box

Hi everyone,

I just finished installing red hat on a new machine that someone had left out on the curb to be trashed. I had to stuff an old hard drive, some ram, and an old cdrom in it, but it's a working P2 Celeron 433mhz now.

I'm using my really old AOC monitor on it now that I was using on another linux box.

I don't think I was having this problem before when the monitor was hooked up to my other box, but now I seem to be getting a lot of temporary flashes of garbage on the monitor. This happens both in X and just from the shell.

e.g., if I hold down the return key in the shell, I can see color stuff with random characters flashing at the bottom of the screen as it refreshes. It goes away when an image is still, but it appears to be more than normal.

Do you think I have the horiz & vert refresh rates set improperly? Red hat seemed to auto-detect them as it auto-detected my monitor brand correctly.

This doesn't just happen in X, so I'm not sure where to change the refresh rate.

Oh, also, I should mention that the power supply makes funny high-pitch noises whenever it's plugged in. It's very subtle when the machine is just plugged in but not on, but they become more pronounced whenever the hard drive or cd drive are spinning. But I don't know if this would affect the monitor since the monitor has its own power supply.

Thanks for any advice!

Swap out the monitor temporarily with another one and see if the flashes continue.

If they do, throw in a different video card and see what happens.

You just have to isolate what it is by trial and error. I know of no quick method of determining the cause.

Yeah, I would imagine it would be tough to determine. Here's my question for anyone who may know:

Do you think enough power can go from the video-card connection to the monitor to fry it if something is wrong with the power supply or the video card? Has anyone ever heard of this happening?

This computer that I have has video support built into the motherboard (not my preferred setup, but the computer is free).

I'm about to buy a new fancy samsung lcd monitor to use for this box, and I'm worried about it getting fried.