Help - freezes at startup

[VampRegen]

Computer is freezing once the windows icon shows up with the loading bar graphic...the graphic stops and it freezes. Also as soon as that screen pops up there is a bunch of colored pixels showing up randomly on the screen.

Previously, when exiting games and some other programs the computer would freeze up. It would blink between a black screen and the desktop - I could move the mouse around during the desktop blinks. It required a restart to fix. Thats been happening awhile but yesterday it started doing it about 10 min after a boot up whether I was doing anything or not. I installed updated drivers for my graphics card last night to see if that would fix it but no change. This morning it won't load up at all except in safe mode (I'm actually typing this on that computer now in safe mode + networking).

Any tips to try before just reformatting would be great.

I got the computer from monarch in late 2005 and it seems they are now defunct. Any tips for a reformat (do they have a recovery/restore partition or anything?).

Specs:

Dual AMD 3800+ 64
2gb RAM
DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D
BFG NVidia GeForce 7900gt
XP Home

 

[joshharrington]

Sounds like it could be a few different things.
A.) Video Card
B.) Possibly the motherboard, but if it's functional then that's probably not the issue
C.) Memory...the root of all evils...

I would start with the video card though...see if you have another one that you could try out with your current configuration. Don't change more than one thing when troubleshooting, this just creates more problems, so start with that and see what you find out.