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My computer monitor imploded – it blew-up suddenly. If you would diagnose this catastrophic single event in my life, and suggest possible measures, I would be grateful.

The colours on my monitor have taken on a life of their own. Things will be normal, and then the colours will change resulting in a bilious green/blue hue to all screens and images. I have sent you a print screen of the Windows desktop, so you can see the problem. Changing various Display settings in the Control Panel has not resolved the issue. How can this problem be resolved?

Occasionally when shutting down the computer a message appears saying that the NVIDIA TwinView window is not responding. To shut down the computer properly I need to click the “End Task” button. What is “TwinView” and how can I stop it interrupting the Windows shutdown process? The computer only has one monitor, so I wonder whether I even need TwinView.

When attempting to play Age of Empires 2 (Gold Edition) the following message appears: “Could not initialise graphics system. Make sure that the video card and driver are compatible with DirectDraw”. I have tried all the suggestions in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article which addresses this issue: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/242902. In addition, I have also reinstalled the updated ATI driver, installed (and reinstalled) the latest version of DirectX, tweaked the hardware acceleration settings, reinstalled the game, booted into Windows VGA mode, and run the game in various compatibility modes. However, none of these procedures has resolved the issue. As a sidenote, other games, such as Sport of Kings and Medieval Total War, work perfectly! The software vendor’s advice and computer manufacturer’s advice was to download the latest graphics card drivers, which I tried without success. The computer is a Toshiba Satellite M70 notebook running Windows XP Professional (SP2) with 512MB RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon X700 graphics card. Any advice you could provide to get the game working would be most appreciated.

A 20mm black vertical strip runs down the right-hand side of my monitor. When I move the mouse to either side of the screen, the display “scrolls” horizontally, allowing the previously hidden portion of the screen to be displayed. However, if the black strip was not present this scroll would not be necessary! The problem briefly corrected itself, but the display was blurred. How can I fix this problem for good? The computer is running Windows XP.