I have had a packard bell ixtreme 6082 for the last couple of years, with few problems. the specs are as follows:
windows xp
digimate 17" tft monitor (res 1280x1024)
agp motherboard (8x)
athlon xp 2700+
512mb pc2700 ram
gigabyte radeon 9200se
80GB 7200rpm HDD (Maxtor)
1x Toshiba DVD-rw drive
A few weeks ago, about 1 in 10 boots, just before the log in screen, the monitor displayed lots of opaque vertical lines (you couldnt see anything behind)down the screen. These appeared to change colour slightly when i moved the mouse. However, after restarting the computer ( pressing button on front) it seemed to work fine, so i put up with it
UNTIL NOW:a few days ago, after booting normally, i left it running unattended. When i returned the same thing had happened. I restarted and this happened again a few hours later. After failing to reach the desktop after restarting (which it did before), i restarted again. this time it said that " windows has recovered from a serious error", and that the cause was the graphics driver.
this has reoccured several times, and each microsoft crash analysis has stated something about the gpu. I then cleaned the inside of the computer( especially the graphics card) with a hoover, as the room it was in had just been rearranged and i thought that it being moved may have stired up dust.
After this not seeming to make a difference I updated my ati driver from 5.7 to the latest (5.10), ( this automatically set my agp speed back to 8x, which i had lowered to make bf2 work) which seemed to stop the start up failures. However, a few minutes ago it randomly restarted itself, and the monitor showed no-signal. After restarting again, the crash analysis stated that the cause was a device driver.
DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT THE PROBLEM IS? It sounds as if the graphics card is bust to me, but i was about to buy a new nvidia one anyway, but if the computer is the problem then i could be wasting my money. PLEASE HELP!
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