Bad video card?

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

Easy to trouble-shoot. Take a known good monitor and plug into your ailing PC. If it does the same thing, it's the video card. It works fine, you know the monitor is bad.

That was actually one of the first things I did, same problem. I then swapped video cards and the PC wouldn't even recognize the new card. After that it decided to stop recognizing my hard drives for a while. I now suspect that it's actually my motherboard that's going.

Long story short: we are buying a new PC in the next few days.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Open it up and make sure the heat sink on the GPU didn't pop off partially. I had an old card that the heat sink popped off due to one of the plastic pins breaking. It gave me all kinds of artifacts and color problems in the visuals due to overheating. If the card is that old I'd replace it in any event.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

Open it up and make sure the heat sink on the GPU didn't pop off partially. I had an old card that the heat sink popped off due to one of the plastic pins breaking. It gave me all kinds of artifacts and color problems in the visuals due to overheating. If the card is that old I'd replace it in any event.

That's something I did not check, will do tonight. Thanks!

I'm not going to sink any more $ into this PC, it's almost 6 years old and not worth it. If I can get a videocard that works elsewhere, fine, but nothing that I have to actually pay for. I'd rather just get a new PC, since I've been thinking on that for a while now.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Sounds like a good plan if it's that old. A modern video card wouldn't help much do to the slow system.

 

[ssampier]

That was actually one of the first things I did, same problem. I then swapped video cards and the PC wouldn't even recognize the new card. After that it decided to stop recognizing my hard drives for a while. I now suspect that it's actually my motherboard that's going.

Long story short: we are buying a new PC in the next few days.

That stinks. But you are getting a new PC at least

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

That stinks. But you are getting a new PC at least

Yep, ordered a laptop the other day! It should arrive on Monday. Then my next plan is to start building a desktop PC of my own specs after the holidays when I have a bit more extra $.

 

[ssampier]

Sounds quite the plan.

I purchased my first laptop a few months ago, I've been most pleased with it.

I'll probably build my own beast in a year or so. My desktop is about four years old, but works fine, recently replaced the HD though.