Is this a graphics card issue?

[ice]

http://www.electrickcow.wronger.com/glitches.JPG

I just installed XP on a fresh hard drive, nothing on it before. It has a lot of errors though. For instance, in IE, sections of the status bar will go red, or pink, or the icon in the corner of the screen will just go to a weird yellow, red, white, and orange square. The cursor changes to whatever it wants to, like right now it is 4 fat inverted bars. It isn't just IE though, anything I run. The taskbar does it a lot to. Whenever a button turns pink around it, I just run my cursor over it, and it goes back to normal. Also, whenever I scroll, the page scrolls, but it also stays, so I have 2 of everything. Also, about every 10 minutes to 1/2 hour, my screen goes black for about 2 seconds, and comes back. Then it will do it again 2 or 3 times, then wait another 10 minutes to 1/2 hour to do it again. This is really annoying. Please help. It's really gettting worse as I go. Also, when I boot up, the bios screen has a lot of black lines around it, and the Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition loading screen too. I tried rolliing graphics card drivers back, updating to latest, uninstalling and installing them, nothing helps. Is this a card or software issue?

[bassman]

Hmmm, sounds like a monitor problem to me. Can you test this monitor on another computer? Or, test the vid card on another computer? Or, test another monitor on this computer?
Is this an original XP disk???

[ice]

I tested this monitor on another computer. Worked fine. That rules out the monitor. It is a origional XP CD. It's an Upgrade OEM editon (but it came straight from MS, not really OEM). I can't test the card in another computer. I did have another XP install on another hard drive in this machine, and it used to work fine, but now it does the same thing.

[bassman]

OK, how about physicaly removing and reseating the vid card or making sure the vid cable is connected securely? Seems to me if the card were having color definition problems, it would not correct simply by moving the mouse around.
Any way of trying another card in this machine (borrow one from a friends comp)?

[Paleo Pete]

Sounds more like a driver issue than anything else to me, you might try removing the card from Device Manager (in Safe Mode and check Add/Remove Programs too) then reinstall the card and drivers.

Also check the card for indications of possible heat problems. Dust coating the heatsink that's mounted on the card's processor chip or fan can act like a blanket, holding heat in. (Same for the CPU and heatsink/fan, clean it too) Clean out all dust and you might try running it with the side cover off and a small fan blowing inside.

I would check for heat problems before removing and reinstalling the card, but for some strange reason I thought of it after I thought of drivers...maybe I need to switch to decaf...:rolleyes:

[ice]

I took the video card to a local computer shop. They tested it, and said it worked fine, but it seemed warm. He looked at it, and said that a capicator was blown, and in fact, it was. I got a newer better card, and it works fine. Thanks for your help.