DeaconBlues
Veteran X
Here's what started it:
Was playing TF2 yesterday and whole computer froze. Hard lockup, no alt-tabbing or ctrl-alt-del would get out of it. Restarted my machine, tried a different 3D game, after a minute or two the same lockup happened. Desktop and 2D games were fine at this point.
I took a look in the case, the dust wasn't too bad, but I cleaned it out. Then I removed the video card (8800 GTS) and noticed the fan had a significant amount of dust, but not to the point that the fan couldn't spin. There was also dust in the vents on the heat sink. I cleaned all that out.
As it stands now the display is fine right through the WinXP loading screen. The moment the desktop starts to load I get blue dots or streaks through my display and eventually the system locks.
In safe mode the system is fine. While in safe mode I uninstalled the NVIDIA drivers and when I restarted in normal mode with a really low resolution the system was fine. I then tried installing the latest video drivers and during the install when the system is recognizing the hardware and changing resolution the same symptoms came back (blue streaks and eventual lockup).
My questions:
Is it possible that my video card got fried to the point that it works fine at low resolution but is no good when set higher?
Do you think this could still be a software issue, or based on what I described is it hardware?
Is there a way to test this without buying a new video card?
Thanks for any help you can provide!
Cliffs:
- 3D games locked up my display, but 2D was okay
- dust on video card fan and vents
- now even 2D video at high resolution locks up system
- safe mode at low res the system is fine
Was playing TF2 yesterday and whole computer froze. Hard lockup, no alt-tabbing or ctrl-alt-del would get out of it. Restarted my machine, tried a different 3D game, after a minute or two the same lockup happened. Desktop and 2D games were fine at this point.
I took a look in the case, the dust wasn't too bad, but I cleaned it out. Then I removed the video card (8800 GTS) and noticed the fan had a significant amount of dust, but not to the point that the fan couldn't spin. There was also dust in the vents on the heat sink. I cleaned all that out.
As it stands now the display is fine right through the WinXP loading screen. The moment the desktop starts to load I get blue dots or streaks through my display and eventually the system locks.
In safe mode the system is fine. While in safe mode I uninstalled the NVIDIA drivers and when I restarted in normal mode with a really low resolution the system was fine. I then tried installing the latest video drivers and during the install when the system is recognizing the hardware and changing resolution the same symptoms came back (blue streaks and eventual lockup).
My questions:
Is it possible that my video card got fried to the point that it works fine at low resolution but is no good when set higher?
Do you think this could still be a software issue, or based on what I described is it hardware?
Is there a way to test this without buying a new video card?
Thanks for any help you can provide!
Cliffs:
- 3D games locked up my display, but 2D was okay
- dust on video card fan and vents
- now even 2D video at high resolution locks up system
- safe mode at low res the system is fine