Awesome advice everyone, thank you.
I'll mention this here since you suggested troubleshooting the problem first, but I'll move this to another thread if necessary. My problem started initially where 1 out of 5 times or so when I'd power on my PC (it would freeze occasionally when left sitting overnight instead of going on standby/sleep. I often just shut it down.) it wouldn't start up - the PC would make a much louder noise than usual (fans kicking on and staying on?) and nothing would display. Power down, power up - works fine. The pc would freeze occasionally while playing games and I'd have to restart. Then one day, it decides to just not display anything at all. No loud fan noise, just normal startup sound but no display.
Any thoughts?
I originally posted here
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?p=35112586#post35112586 and the person suggested it may be the video card among other things, but then I got busy and never followed up on it, then moved and all my belongings sat in storage for two months while I was stuck in a hotel waiting on my house to close... No fun!! Now I'm ready to tackle this problem.
Thanks all, and if this isn't the right place for this, I can move it back to the previous thread and go from there.