- Joined
- Feb 6, 2005
Yesterday I found myself spending about 12 hours fooling around with the computer in my signature. First time in 2-3 years it has given me any sort of trouble what so ever.
Where do I start?
I don't use screen savers on my computer, I just set my monitors to turn off after 20 minutes of inactivity. I was gone for about 8 hours the other night, when I got home my monitors were still on. I was worried I ruined my monitors because of this (HP w2207, and a Viewsonic VX922). This was the first sign of something abnormal to me.
I decide to reboot and on the first reboot, I can't even get past/into the Windows XP screen. My computer is basically locked up, I reboot it again.
Second-third reboot, I will get to the desktop and both my monitors will have red speckles of pixels splattered across the screen in a very repetitive manner. Almost as if someone used the spray can feature in Paint with red, and went across the monitor like a checkerboard board. Spot here, blank, spot here blank, etc. Most of my programs are not very responsive, the mouse acts up, while a trail of red speckles follows it and it ends up freezing.
Rebooting a couple more times, I eventually get to the desktop with no looks of a problem. Websites are working fine, internet is great. Instant messenger works just fine. I go to load up World of Warcraft and I artifact/glitch out at the start up screen. Computer is completely locked up, nothings responds and I am forced to turn it off.
At this point I'm convinced it was my monitors/video card that were ruined and I thought I had burned an image or pixels in. I was also worried about my motherboard/mouse.
I opened up my case to make sure everything was working even while still getting lock ups/pixel discolorations. Every fan is running, nothing shows a sign of a problem except for the video card being almost too hot to touch. I decided to take a look at the video card and make sure its seated properly. I take it out, I take it apart and I wiped it down clean with alcohol 91%, and reapplied some arctic silver 5. I figured that heat might be the issue, and hopefully this would help.
So I put it back in, properly seated and hooked up with x2 PCI-E connectors, and still have troubles.
I then take the 8800GTX out of my current computer, and put it in my old one with a DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 SLI-DR. I change the drivers and such, and attempt to load up WoW. Screen locks up just like before on my current system. Few reboots, few retries, I notice a couple discolorations and failures to load WoW, but ultimately I'm convinced it is the video card that is the problem here.
Don't ask me why but I am still not 100% convinced that my video card is the only problem. I also think my motherboard might be cause of some of the problem. At this point I am not really sure how to properly 100% test out to see what part is the cause of the problems. It may or may not be just the video card at fault. At the end of all the screwing around with the PC with the 8800GTX in it, my keyboard actually started to type backwards. I could not get my keyboard to type normally.
Between a lot of really funky problems, mouse getting suck, discoloration, pixel deformities, keyboard typing backwards, windows getting stuck. I reformatted thinking I might have done some serious corruption with windows and registry and what not, but I just was exhausting any theoretical problem that I thought might help. I couldn't find proper drivers for my MSI motherboard, couldn't get internet working. Just lots of problems that I was becoming very frustrated with near the end.
I'm convinced that it is my video card that needs replaced, but I don't know if I have done enough tests to verify the true problem. I think I did, but that's why I'm here asking in the first place. - If my video card does need to go, I was looking into it, and my MSI board only supports PCI Express 16X (not 2.0). Most of the cards these days are 2.0 in bandwidth, so I would in theory be only getting half the new card by putting it in the old board. I also took note that the only real original PCI-E 16x cards out these days are in the 8600GT era for about 80 bucks.
What would you do in my shoes, what should I do? Do I buy an older video card just to get it to hopefully work? assuming that video card was the only problem, and sell it for as much as I can? I was planning on selling the PC in my sig (including the 8800GTX before it broke of course) for about 500 dollars locally and building a new one. I think I am going to be building a new one regardless, pretty near top of the line, but I'm just not sure what to do.
Where do I start?
I don't use screen savers on my computer, I just set my monitors to turn off after 20 minutes of inactivity. I was gone for about 8 hours the other night, when I got home my monitors were still on. I was worried I ruined my monitors because of this (HP w2207, and a Viewsonic VX922). This was the first sign of something abnormal to me.
I decide to reboot and on the first reboot, I can't even get past/into the Windows XP screen. My computer is basically locked up, I reboot it again.
Second-third reboot, I will get to the desktop and both my monitors will have red speckles of pixels splattered across the screen in a very repetitive manner. Almost as if someone used the spray can feature in Paint with red, and went across the monitor like a checkerboard board. Spot here, blank, spot here blank, etc. Most of my programs are not very responsive, the mouse acts up, while a trail of red speckles follows it and it ends up freezing.
Rebooting a couple more times, I eventually get to the desktop with no looks of a problem. Websites are working fine, internet is great. Instant messenger works just fine. I go to load up World of Warcraft and I artifact/glitch out at the start up screen. Computer is completely locked up, nothings responds and I am forced to turn it off.
At this point I'm convinced it was my monitors/video card that were ruined and I thought I had burned an image or pixels in. I was also worried about my motherboard/mouse.
I opened up my case to make sure everything was working even while still getting lock ups/pixel discolorations. Every fan is running, nothing shows a sign of a problem except for the video card being almost too hot to touch. I decided to take a look at the video card and make sure its seated properly. I take it out, I take it apart and I wiped it down clean with alcohol 91%, and reapplied some arctic silver 5. I figured that heat might be the issue, and hopefully this would help.
So I put it back in, properly seated and hooked up with x2 PCI-E connectors, and still have troubles.
I then take the 8800GTX out of my current computer, and put it in my old one with a DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 SLI-DR. I change the drivers and such, and attempt to load up WoW. Screen locks up just like before on my current system. Few reboots, few retries, I notice a couple discolorations and failures to load WoW, but ultimately I'm convinced it is the video card that is the problem here.
Don't ask me why but I am still not 100% convinced that my video card is the only problem. I also think my motherboard might be cause of some of the problem. At this point I am not really sure how to properly 100% test out to see what part is the cause of the problems. It may or may not be just the video card at fault. At the end of all the screwing around with the PC with the 8800GTX in it, my keyboard actually started to type backwards. I could not get my keyboard to type normally.
Between a lot of really funky problems, mouse getting suck, discoloration, pixel deformities, keyboard typing backwards, windows getting stuck. I reformatted thinking I might have done some serious corruption with windows and registry and what not, but I just was exhausting any theoretical problem that I thought might help. I couldn't find proper drivers for my MSI motherboard, couldn't get internet working. Just lots of problems that I was becoming very frustrated with near the end.
I'm convinced that it is my video card that needs replaced, but I don't know if I have done enough tests to verify the true problem. I think I did, but that's why I'm here asking in the first place. - If my video card does need to go, I was looking into it, and my MSI board only supports PCI Express 16X (not 2.0). Most of the cards these days are 2.0 in bandwidth, so I would in theory be only getting half the new card by putting it in the old board. I also took note that the only real original PCI-E 16x cards out these days are in the 8600GT era for about 80 bucks.
What would you do in my shoes, what should I do? Do I buy an older video card just to get it to hopefully work? assuming that video card was the only problem, and sell it for as much as I can? I was planning on selling the PC in my sig (including the 8800GTX before it broke of course) for about 500 dollars locally and building a new one. I think I am going to be building a new one regardless, pretty near top of the line, but I'm just not sure what to do.
