posted before but i'm gettin worried about this. . .

[Blackearth]

i posted a while back about this and was told it was just my graphics card initializing (which i had never heard of). heres whats going on: alright, alot of time when i turn on my computer there will be blue lines going vertically on the screen. with various characters(looks like mostly dollar signs) taken up most space on the screen (cept its very faint), i dont do anything it continues to load windows (the characters go away at this point but the lines and color distortion remains). now, half the time one of 2 things will happen: 1) i will get a "out of range" messgae on my monitor(but my monitor runs up to 1600xwhatever, my gcard's max res cant be much higher if at all); or 2) windows comes up fully functional except teher are wacky, vertical lines everywhere and the color is horribly distorted essentially unusable. the rest of the time the lines and crap go away when windows finishes loading an the res is chagned. could it be my geforce2gts 32mbddr(asusv7700) or my monitor? i didnt get my gcard from a very good site and i got an oem when i ordered a retail (they didnt even have oem's offered at their site!) which came with a fan (not the ones that usually come one the asus card, my friend has the exact same, diff h&s) so puny the fan on my 10$ removeable hdd rack is more powerfull! i shudder to think what would have happend had i kept it on there.and the drivers came on a cdr (they werent the asus "enhanced" either, just reference. my friends oem came with an asus disc). so, can anybody help me? in another, possibly related event. i unistalled the 12.41 ref drivers so i could install the newest asus drivers (12.90). setup could not detect a card on my system so i installed with the .inf file. and i actually paid attention to the hardware wizard this time (you know, it gets second nature, you don read the info anymroe) and its recognizing my gcard as a pci vga graphics adapter-wtf? its working just fine now. . . but what the mel is wrong? i cant recall if i had this prob with win2k (damn ntoskernel.exe kept corrupting so i went back to 98). . .

[Pinky]

TMI (too much information)!!! :p

I guess it's better to be thorough.

If the video card is garbled or having issues as soon as you turn the PC on, then it's NOT drivers (they don't come into play until windows initializes). It sounds to me like overheating. Try removing the heatsink/fan, make sure there's thermal compound on that puppy (if there's none or what is on there is not covering the whole chip, spread it thinly or add some, again only a thin layer... too much will work in reverse and cause poor heat transfer). Make sure the heatsink is firmly and evenly on the chip, tilting or any gaps will not transfer heat as efficiently.

While you have the card out, make sure all the contacts on the card and the AGP slot are clean/no dirt. Dirt can break connection enough to cause your type of problems too.

If it isn't heat or dirty contacts it could be a bunch of other things, but it's likely likely heat (you won't like some of the other options ;)).

[Blackearth]

i've cleaned all the connectors before didnt make a difference. as far as overheating-doubt it. i've got 2 fans on my gpu, a blorb on the front and on the back i have a small chipset fan i found (suprising power for its size though, no label or nothing on it) in my toolbox; i have the fan just laying on the back(directly overthe back of the gpu), i just finished playing max payne for 3-4 hours straight and i checked my card. wasnt but a little warm.