CompuServe Messages

Further to Kevin's comment, I now have an accumulation of 4 (four) ATI VVESA.COMs. Two of them don't work at all; of the remaining two, one offers all three VESA resolutions, and the other, only the 640 x 400, but in both cases movement of the cursor leaves behind a trail on garbage pixels. This isn't strictly noise, but a painting onto the screen of the contents of a video buffer *somewhere*. This is proved by the fact that upon clearing the screen, systematic scanning by the cursor repaints precisely the same image. This image consists of a series of verticle bars with four (or five?) uncontaminated bars inbetween each successive contaminant bars. The problem persists when the computer is stripped bare, both card-wise and soft ware wise; i.e., all other cards yanked out, nothing in upper memory, no mouse or tsrs, and booting up from a bare-bones config.sys with no Autoexec.bat. If you are having similar problems try giving ATI a call: (416) 756-0711 and ask for James Mann. He doesn't seem to believe that I have a real problem (despite the evidence provided by the .GIF file I uploaded to him) and maybe some input from the rest of you might do some good. Incidently, I didn't buy my computer from a garage sale in Taiwan; it is a Northgate 386/33 and as such I take it to be a high-quality clone. Three weeks ago, ATI said they would send me some ROM upgrades for my board (which is nearly two years old). When I called them about their non-arrival, they said there had been 'delays in shipment'. If I ever receive them, and they cure the problem, I will post an announcement. For those of you experiencing this problem, I have a compressed file available which includes a captured .GIF image of the problem plus a text file listing the various vital statistics of the computer's usgae of memory, IRQs, etc. I would be glad to download it to you. Stephen and some complaints from the rest of you just might produce some results.