When did this start?  Let's assume its not a virus, not a safe assumption,
but let's assume it anyway.
Dos uses a fixed memory address for the text data displayed to the screen.
I'm afraid my 'dos' memory is fading but text starts at B000:0000 and is
4000 bytes, just enough to show the characters in an 80x25 array and a few
simple attributes, blinking, bold, and underline.  In the original pc there
was no physical memory at this address sinces it is above 640k, later the
memory was 'reserved' so a pc couldn't use all the installed ram, today the
address is relocated, called 'shadowed', so ram appears contiguous to the
operating system.
Notebooks don't have much in the way of CMOS settings, but I would attempt
to turn off video and BIOS shadowing, and disable any ram caching, if your
notebook will allow it.  It is worthwhile to try this because you can't be
certain where B000:0000 is on your system, so you want to stop it from being
moved if possible.
If the problem persists, I would suspect a bad video card.
If you can't do much with cmos, I would try using one ram simm at a time to
see if it clears up.  Bad ram can be a culprit, but it is suspicious that
windows works.  Graphics are in another area of ram, and windows is entirely
a graphics app, but the chance that a bug with ram could not spill over and
effect the graphics data is remote.
video cards use completely different addresses and ram for graphics.  Text
has to have legacy support because lots of apps addressed the ram address
B000:0000 directly, bypassing dos, so the industry can't do anything
creative, but graphics has evolved considerably because windows apps are not
supposed to address ram directly.  With that in mind, the text functions of
the video card could fail separately from the graphics portion.

Having said all that, this sort of 'targeted' failure also looks like a
virus attack, however.  A virus may have only the capability to mess with
the text functions, because of size, or the hacker's inexperience.
Tom Turak

-----Original Message-----
From: james martiny [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2001 7:18 PM


I have a lexbook se10 notebook running win 3.11.  Text characters that
appear on the screen at bootup, all dos text, and text in the cmos setup
screens have garbled charaecters.  Most characters that are bad have the
next ascii value.  t's are u's, r's are s's etc. The cmos screens also have
many exclamation marks (!) all over the screen.  win 3.11 seems to run ok.
The initial cmos screen has the date and time changing wildly.  I have run
virus checks for dos and 3.11 and they have been clean.  Is this just a cmos
battery issue? or a MB problem?  I was leaning towards the cmos battery idea
, but even a dos prompt and typing in dos commands have changed charecters.
Whwy would the cmos battery have anything to do with the system after bootup
and OS load?

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