[TheBagman]

I have a problem with my computer.

What happens is that all of a sudden the screen would go black, but the fan continues to run. The monitor still stay on, but the power light would turn amber, so it goes into standby. It was shortly after I just reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows XP Home. Shorty after this started happening once in a while, it quit for two days. Then all of a sudden it did it again, but this time the screen went blue with colums. Hard to explain, but it looked all scrambled.

Anyways, I decided to reformat again. I do so. Right away the same problem again, without the blue screen. It happens really frequently when installing programs, it seemed to get through SP2 fine, but it does it really frequently. Sometimes it will go 2 minutes, sometimes it will go for 20 minutes it seems. Average about ten minutes. Becoming more and more frequent, like just now I had to restart 3 times within the last 10 minutes. Sometimes it will freeze one program at a time it seems until my mouse and keyboard have froze, then if I leave it it will go black again, and I have to hard reboot. I do all the updates for Microsoft, and install my mobo drivers, some programs, etc. So it's continuing to do this. Just "shuts down" but the fan is still running, and the monitor goes into stand by.

It's not a heat problem, because my cpu and mobo temp do not go above 45 degrees Celsius, hanging around 100-110 Farenhiet. I installed all the microsoft updates that the updater could find.

If this will help my specs are:

Windows Microsoft XP Home SP2
Maxtor 120GB HD 8MB Cache
P4 2.6 GHZ 800mhz fsb
Asus P4P800 Deluxe
512mb(2X256mb) Geil pc3500 433mhz DDR
Radeon 9800 Pro
Enermax 460w PSU

I'm stuck, and not sure what the problem could be. It took me several restartrts, probably 15 just to write this and post it, lol... Any help in resolving this would be much appreciated. Thank you.

[TheBagman]

Fuck. Blue sceens back.

It's blue, with colums of different collors in vertical lines if that makes any sense. Looks funky.

[pube]

if your comp and screen is fucked how the fuck are you on here?

[AnnonUSA]

DA Reseat and clean up the Video card. Sounds like it might be time for a new Video board. If it has a heatsink clean it off. But I think it's either fried or on the way to computer heaven.

When you load the drivers for it (video) are you using the original disk or downloading the latest drivers?

The monitor going amber is the tipoff. I have seen this symptom caused by Video cards before..... It could be a motherboard, but I doubt it.

[TheBagman]

Originally Posted by Pube

if your comp and screen is fucked how the fuck are you on here?

You're a dumbass.

Thanks Annon, I'll try that.

[TheBagman]

Annon, a guy at another forum told me it might be a RAM issue. Do you think this might be the case as well? He gave me a program to try and DL and burn, but I highly doubt I'll be able to download and burn it because of this issue.

What's your take? Because sometimes the programs are freezing before the monitor even goes dark, and the amber light comes on. But, you guys are the experts.

If I went to Circuit City or Best Buy and bought a new graphics card, and that wasn't it, do you think they would let me take it back and exchange it for some RAM?

Originally Posted by darkjedi

sounds like it could be a dodgy ram issue. If you're able to, download Hiren's Boot CD, burn it to disk and boot from it. There should be some memory testing utilities on there for you to try.

[AnnonUSA]

ATI may have a diagnostic program you can run to test the video board. If it is ram, how many Dimms do you have? Try swapping sockets of the Dimms and see if the symptom changes. Also you should be able to find some memory diagnostics to run on line.

[TheBagman]

yeah reseated everything and seems to be working fine now (knock on wood). Decided to upgrade to a Gig of Ram anyways.