Metropol

As the title suggests I'm running Windows XP. Rofl.

Today I got home from work and fired up the PC and straight into my TV card to watch X Factor. Suddenly some blue marks started appearing on the black area's of the video. On exiting the programme I noticed blue/cyan & red dots started appearing on the display. I thought I'll restart and hope for the best - Couldn't be my monitor as it's relatively new.

On restarting I noticed that the startup screens now had garbled letters, numbers and colour blocks appearing. (I.e the first screen lists all the drives and it was filled with letters, numbers and blocks).

On the restart it didn't come back on at all, so restart after restart and finally it returned. But with some cruel twists.

On loading applications which demand high memory/cpu usage it will cause the display to go off completely - the monitory stays on and doesn't go into standby just the screen goes completely black then re-appears. The CPU Kernal usage is constantly 100% on loading these apps and they won't load at all just sit half loaded.

On some occasions loading task manager results in nothing more than a grey & white block with no text or buttons there.

Any ideas? I think it's my graphics card - Creative GeForce2MX that's now packing up (it did all this a few weeks back and I got it sorted but still had the odd stray dot). I doubt it's the monitor as the monitor isn't going into standby or the on-screen controls for the monitor don't corrupt when brought up.

I have taken the card out and removed the dust from it and put it back in, it worked trouble free for a few mins. I have also re-installed the drivers and software for it.

I'd agree its the Graphics card. Sounds like the effect you get when overclocking a card. Are you sure its being kept cool enough, the fans spinning etc? If so it may be on its way out. If you have on-board video try that and see if the problem goes. If not try borring a graphics card etc. But luckly it does seem like a graphics problem not a whole pc problem, so should be quite fix-a-ble.

It doesn't have any fans on the card itself because it's not a terribly powerful card, although the card does get 'warm'. Overheating is a problem with this PC because there isn't an extra fan inside it, I have one on the way. I've got another graphics card on it's way also.

I had a feeling it was the card and had been meaning to replace it. No worries - it does only seem to do it after hours/days of constant usage. It's been turned off since I posted yesterday and it's now not showing any problems.