Freezybear
Junior Member
Short story: Computer of 4 years now has odd diagonal artifacts and will no longer boot into windows. No warning signs beforehand.
What's happening: Computer turns on and immediately from the bios loading shows odd boxy diagonal over-layed artifacts with occasional ASCII text substitutions. An upward facing arrow and a British Pound symbol are two of the more common seemingly random letter replacements. These persist into any bios settings screens. The computer continues loading until after the window's logo loading screen and proceeds to freeze on a black screen. Safe mode will get me to a desktop (after an abnormally long load) but no amount of graphic driver updates/rollbacks seems to have any effect.
Stuff I've tried:
- Seemed unlikely with the odd text substitutions but the monitor was confirmed ok by swapping to another computer successfully.
- Visual inspection showed nothing out of the ordinary inside or out of the case. Heat sinks/cards were reset and cables reconnected. No effect.
- Memory was tested as single sticks and replaced with no change.
- Hard drive was swapped out into another computer and replaced with another to test. No change!
Stuff I suspect:
-A friend suggested my 7800 gtx's memory could have corrupted somehow. Unfortunately it's the only PCIe video card at my disposal and my mainboard does not have integrated graphics. This seems pretty likely to me seeing as how the graphical errors occur right from power on and to my knowledge is the only remaining piece involved with showing output that hasn't been confirmed to be ok still. What's left that could be broken and cause these issues?
Anyone have any thoughts or experience with a similar problem? Can the potential problems be narrowed into the video card itself enough to warrant the purchase of a ~$100 graphics card like a 4770 or 4850 to test? With all the new major toys (i5, Windows 7, SATA 3, USB3, etc.) coming out in the next few months I hesitate to go ahead with a full computer build for at least a few more months, but I do need (want?) a moderately powered -working- computer capable of some gaming until I do get around to a new build.
Insight and comments most welcome!
What's happening: Computer turns on and immediately from the bios loading shows odd boxy diagonal over-layed artifacts with occasional ASCII text substitutions. An upward facing arrow and a British Pound symbol are two of the more common seemingly random letter replacements. These persist into any bios settings screens. The computer continues loading until after the window's logo loading screen and proceeds to freeze on a black screen. Safe mode will get me to a desktop (after an abnormally long load) but no amount of graphic driver updates/rollbacks seems to have any effect.
Stuff I've tried:
- Seemed unlikely with the odd text substitutions but the monitor was confirmed ok by swapping to another computer successfully.
- Visual inspection showed nothing out of the ordinary inside or out of the case. Heat sinks/cards were reset and cables reconnected. No effect.
- Memory was tested as single sticks and replaced with no change.
- Hard drive was swapped out into another computer and replaced with another to test. No change!
Stuff I suspect:
-A friend suggested my 7800 gtx's memory could have corrupted somehow. Unfortunately it's the only PCIe video card at my disposal and my mainboard does not have integrated graphics. This seems pretty likely to me seeing as how the graphical errors occur right from power on and to my knowledge is the only remaining piece involved with showing output that hasn't been confirmed to be ok still. What's left that could be broken and cause these issues?
Anyone have any thoughts or experience with a similar problem? Can the potential problems be narrowed into the video card itself enough to warrant the purchase of a ~$100 graphics card like a 4770 or 4850 to test? With all the new major toys (i5, Windows 7, SATA 3, USB3, etc.) coming out in the next few months I hesitate to go ahead with a full computer build for at least a few more months, but I do need (want?) a moderately powered -working- computer capable of some gaming until I do get around to a new build.
Insight and comments most welcome!