Blown video card

Saturday, October 18th, 2003

About a week ago, my TV tuner in the computer began to act up. It would hang instead of exit when I tried to turn it off. It would lock up when I tried to change channels. Sometimes it would turn off, but keep the audio channel going and I’d have to reboot to get rid of the sound.

Then two days ago, I got a few crashes in Everquest. Now that is uncool. I began troubleshooting in earnest. I loaded the latest video driver. I even (incredibly stupidly) installed SP4 for Windows2K. That caused me to do a lot of rebooting and then I noticed that the text boot screen wouldn’t show, but the monitor would say it wasn’t getting a signal until the graphical splash screen of Win2K. That’s odd.

I was able to force it to show me the text boot screen by powering down, removing the power cable, and waiting for five mintues, then powering up. That showed me a Bios screen with a lot of random colors in it. It was still readable, but every 16th character was a different color. I began to get the idea I had a hardware issue. I figured it was system memory or the video card.

I swapped the video card and all the symptoms went away.

Bill answered my call for help and recommended the ATI Radeon 9600 Plus. It looks like a good card, so I ordered one from Newegg and it should arrive by Wednesday. Until then, I’m off EQ and I’m not sure I’m handling it too well. I wander around the house and stare at the walls. I’ve been considereing stealing Julie’s video card after she goes to sleep. I’ll let you know how that goes.