Corrupted screen before windows XP loads

[lenjack]

First, my specs:

p4 2.53, retail hsf, not oc
p4pe asus board, bios 1002
256M Crucial pc2100
Maxtor 40G 7200 rpm hd
Maxtor 20G 7200 rpm hd
Gigabyte Radeon 8500le,64M, catalyst 3.0, stock speed
dx8.1
cdrw
cdrom
Santa Cruz sound
floppy

I've been running this setup for over a month with no problems. Several days ago, I started getting video corruption before XP loads. I get vertical rows of horizontal hashmarks, then long gray vertical rectangles, then colored rectangles. All this time, I can still make out the logos and text on the screen with great difficulty. This continues through "starting windows XP". Then when XP loads, all is fine and remains so until the next boot.

Any input would be welcomel.

TIA

[edit] I was using catalyst 2.5 up to a week ago, and switched to cat 3 several days before this happened. I'v reverted to cat 2.5, but with no change

 

[KF]

Input: Any time I have seen this sort of thing, there is a developing problem with the video card and the junk eventually shows up in Windows. What you see is corrupt video memory; what is being read out is not what was supposed to have been put there.

However, I believe high performance video cards have for quite some time used an entirely separate section of the chip to provide VGA compatibility. The major part of the chip is used for the high performance graphics that is ultimately enabled by the Windows driver once Windows boots up. The part of video memory used by VGA when displaying boot-up info is probably under 64K, that's Kilobytes not Megabytes. VGA is the name of a grahics card that was once standard for IBM PCs and clones, from which all modern PCs have evolved. But every video card still needs to have a sort of VGA card built in so the BIOS can boot with any video card. At some point Windows switches to the fancy stuff.

Reseat the video card in the slot. Make sure the heat sink on the video chip is making good contact. Check the video card by putting it in another machine.

 

[lenjack]

thanks...I've reseated the card, but will do so again. I should mention that before I reseated it, the problem was showing in windows. After the reseat, it only showed up in the boot screens.

 

[lenjack]

Just swapped 8500's with a friend. It' definitely the card. Windows is now badly affected.