Hmm… Could be the contrast is high…
(checking my contrast to see if it induces stepping…)
Well, my monitor I can’t induce stepping through settings (Samsung SyncMaster 940BW). I guess that doesn’t prove it’s not possible, but it looks unlikely. Possible, so you might check that.
You might also check to make sure your driver is not set to a Plug and Play driver and is an actual driver for that monitor; I’ve seen some ugliness when I had a monitor that was a newer model and XP was using a generic PnP driver. That would sound about like what you’re describing, in fact.
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I say, let’s not start an OS flame war; who cares?
Interestingly, all the support forum topics that ask about this issue are Apple-related.
Coincidence? Well, I imagine most Apple desktop users are more inclined to be picky about things like gradients and ugly display issues. It does cater to media folks.
But the power saving “feature” disabling fix, that I got from an Apple support forum for someone running a dual-boot on an iMac system:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7010236
In addition, the old “blue screen of death” was supposedly caused by bad video display drivers (for the most part); when they went caput, the system went caput. This was fixed when MS began their driver certification program to force good driver authoring/support, and happened with the switch to Windows 2000 (the precursor NT-family system to the XP/Vista line).
Back then, that was a pain for Windows 2000 users at first; there weren’t many certified drivers supported for a few months, so many users just had to wait or bypass it with buggy drivers. However, the blue screen issue did go away after that, due primarily to better driver certification and support that came over time.
Authoring hardware drivers has been explained to me by computer engineering students at my university as about as enjoyable as riding a greased bike downhill with no seat and an angry monkey banging away on your head. Good driver authors are not easy to find, apparently.