white screen suddenly, but computer keeps "working"

Hey all,

Got a computer from a friend and we are trying to get it to work.

It will work fine and then suddenly, a white screen, or a white screen with vertical "bars" appears as if it is frozen and the only thing to do is to un plug it. ctrl +alt+del does not work. there is no way to get through to it when it does this.

Strange thing is, when it does this, it seems to keep "working". For example, if I have a download going when it happens, it seems to keep going and when I start it up again there is more downloaded then when the screen first turned white.

So I am wondering if this could be a video card problem. The computer was plugged into another Monitor and it did the same thing so we ruled that out.

Thanks guys. Any idea of where to start is appretiated.

 

First we need a bit of information.
What is the make/model of the computer?
Is the graphics card "onboard" (built into the motherboard) or a (PCI/AGP etc.) card?
What is your operating system (XP/Vista etc.)

 

The only time I ever got the "white" screen it turned out to be ram. At first all I had to do was to pull and replace the sticks and it would work but eventually I RMAed the sticks as they failed a Memtest86 run. You could also try pulling and reseating the video card as well.

 

Both things mentioned already were my first two thoughts as I read the opening post. If you have onboard video, remove the video card and use the onboard; if you're using the onboard, install a video card and try it. You should also run a bootable memory diagnostic, that way you rule out Windows as being a possible cause. I like this one: http://www.majorgeeks.com/Microsoft_Windows_Memory_Diagnostic_d3955.html You can create a bootable floppy disk, or an ISO file to burn as an image to a CD. Then boot to it, press T to run the extended tests, and run at least 3 or 4 passes. It will take some time so be patient. I don't think it's a driver issue, but you can try running in safe mode to eliminate that as a cause; if the whiteness still occurs in safe mode then you know for sure it's either the RAM or video.