Some text appears blurry, clears up if mouseover

I also ran ATI's diagnostic driver updater on my PC; it installed a new driver (although Windows said my driver was the latest one). After reboot, same problem.

As I see it (I could be wrong!), all that's left is the video card, or some malware.

Years ago, there was a virus (Twisty?) which would suddenly take chunks of your screen and swap them like a puzzle. I thought it's possible it was a virus or malware, so I wrote to Avast describing the problem, but still no response.

I had exactly the same problem. I was sure it was a virus, but could not find anything.
Finally after hours of research I think I got it. Its pretty simple.
Open options in your browser. I had a mozilla. Go to last tab advanced and untick the
use hardware accelaration.
Well looks like it did it for me.

good luck

I had exactly the same problem. I was sure it was a virus, but could not find anything.
Finally after hours of research I think I got it. Its pretty simple. I had a mozilla
Open options in your browser. . Go to last tab advanced and un tick the
use hardware accelaration.
Well looks like it did it for me.

good luck

bpadlows said:

This problem started about 3 weeks ago. Every now & then (about half the time on PC) the text on the screen appears to be fuzzy or blurry, almost washed-out as if it were waterbased ink in the rain (see attached screen grab); it almost looks washed-out or sometimes grayed out. If I mouseover and highlight the blurry text and then click outside the selected, fuzzy-text area (de-select the text) or scroll up & down, the font then goes back to normal for a little while (returns very soon). This happens when browsing (via Firefox), in wordpad, Word, Excel, and even the names of desktop icons and when typing in a blog- like this one, text in news articles, captions of photos, etc. are blurry. Note that only the text, never any image, is blurry. Monitor is a Hannspree 23.5" LCD, card is ATI Radeon H 4250, OS is Win 7 Ult 64 bit, 8G RAM, AMD Phenom II X6 1055T 2.80 GHz. PC is homebuilt but has been running perfectly for over a year. I have made no system changes, and have not downloaded any software recently. The entire screen does not show blurry text, usually just a section of it, say 10-20% but in the same area. I read on some blogs where they suggested it could be caused by using the VGA out put into a digital monitor (as mine was ALWAYS set up) so I swapped out the VGA cable for a DVI cable. Same issue. I tried every single resolution choice on the display, still the same. I reinstalled the video card's driver, downloading it from ATI. Still the same. I unchecked "Soften edges of fonts", still the same.

Lastly, I swapped out the monitor for another LCD monitor ("Generic PnP monitor", 15" of unknown make) but STILL have the same problem. Virus scan via Avast 8 finds nothing. It's very difficult to use the PC now, as the text is often unreadable.

I have attached a screen grab of the very window I was typing in on this forum when suddenly I got the fuzzy text symptom.

Anyone have any ideas? This is driving me nuts!

Got it! I've had this problem for a few weeks, and I was having a terrible time trying to find the issue. Most postings send you to tune the ClearType. Turns out, it's a FireFox problem. Open an instance of the browser, go into Tools, Options, then the Advanced tab, and the General sub-tab. Make sure the "use hardware acceleration when available" box is not checked.

That's it! Hope it works for you too.