Bad video card?

[HewittC4]

This morning, one of my computers started acting up. The computer locked up and the screen was flashing. The image was the same, from where the computer froze, but it got brighter and dimmer.

When I rebooted, the POST screen had a bunch of garbage, mostly a bunch of "("s, with some of the text readable and some garbled. The computer finished booting normally, only to have the initial problem repeat. I rebooted again and it started normally, only to lock up on the windows splash screen.

I haven't made any changes to the computer recently.

Any attempt to reboot results in any of the above problems. Money is tight right now, so I don't want to buy a new video card just to test.

So does this sound like my video card went bad?

Thank you.

[Fruss Tray Ted]

Are you sure the POST screen is garbled or one of the bootup screens past that? Do you hear the typical 'one beep' to indicate a successful POST? Could you see the peripheral list, ie hard drives, optical drives etc?

If you are successfully getting past the POST, you can try an operating system on CD such as Knoppix, Vixta, Ubuntu etc. This will help in determining hardware versus software problems. If the CD's work well, your MS software is having problems such as drivers, malware etc. If any one of the CD's fail, you would want to concentrate your diagnoses to hardware.

[HewittC4]

No beep, and pretty much every screen is messed up now.

I put in a Linux boot disc that has several flavors of Ubuntu and a memory test program. The screen to select which flavor looked fine, and I chose the memory tester. It is running, but it is garbled with mostly the ( character.

Booting to Ubuntu, there are screens that look normal (or at least I think they do, the logo looks normal but the background looks fairly pixelated for a current release). Then it finishes with a screwed up screen. There are 2 clear logos, with 4 warped logos above it on the top of the screen, with white horizontal bars of various sizes with rough edges along the bottom half of the screen.

[Fruss Tray Ted]

The screen to select which flavor looked fine
A limited video screen similar to BIOS

It seems your video cannot go from basic commands to more precise instructions such as 16 or 32 bit resolution so it appears your suspicions are correct and it is the video card itself giving you problems. But this does not eliminate your motherboard yet. Trying a newer video card, pci, AGP, pci-e, etc, would be the only way to eliminate that variable.

But then, you could try reloading your current vid card's drivers as well. AFTER removing them from DM

[saphalline]

Sounds like one or more of the RAM chips on the vid card has gone south. Just as bad as the whole thing dying, really. If you can't see anything, what's the point!?

[HewittC4]

Thank you the responses. I appreciate that I can come here for advice.

I completely forgot about the fact that this computer came with onboard video. I pulled the card and booted to the onboard video and it works fine, so it is definitely a bad card. Unfortunately, the reason why I bought the card was because I do graphics on this computer and the onboard chip works but is fairly slow.