Heavily Distorted Display

[Nycto]

Hi,

I have an 800mhz Pentium III with a GeForce 5500 FX graphics card, and am running the drivers that came with the card.

For whatever reason, my display is heavily distorted. I have provided a couple of images show that you can see what is going on with my display.

http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h8...0/DSCF6991.jpg

http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h8...0/DSCF7003.jpg

http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h8...0/DSCF6992.jpg

My display went south on me while I was upgrading my computer to SP3 for XP. Now, XP won't even boot. The farthest my XP boot gets is depicted in the second image. I can, however, load up ME, albeit all distorted, as shown in the third image.

I've had this happen once before, and when that happened, I managed to install the latest drivers for my graphics card under XP, and it resolved the problem. However, now I cannot even get XP to boot (I wiped the XP drive and am using a clean install). Since I can get into ME, I tried using the latest ME drivers to fix the issue, and it did nothing. I know the monitor works, because I just recently used it with my old PowerMac G4.

So, I am not sure if the card is bad, if the drivers need to be updated, or if it's something else. I'd greatly appreciate any help anyone could offer, cause I'd really like having that computer back.

Thanks,
Nycto

[akhilles]

The easiest & cheapest solution is lug this pc to a friend's with a similar one & try your parts one by one in his pc. Starting with gpu, ram, etc.

[Nycto]

I'd like to think there would exist another way to trouble shoot the system other than hoping one of my buddies has a similar clunker floating around. I'm guessing it's not a driver issue because I cannot get the system to boot into safe mode, which doesn't use the drivers. I know it's not a hard drive because the display is messed up regardless of the drive and regardless of the operating system. So really, I would think that it's possibly a memory issue, the graphics card is fried, or perhaps the motherboard is on it's way out. I guess what I'm looking for is some diagnostic software, or maybe someone with experience in handling a similar problem who might be able to offer some pointers.

[dlb]

The video card has failed. To be sure, just buy a used el-cheepo at your local used PC shop; a cheap 8mb or 16mb video card shouldn't be more than $5 or $10. Every time I have ever seen screen like the ones you have at those links above, it's been a failed video card. There is a chance that it's RAM or the motherboard, but when RAM dies, the PC will usually not even boot as far as yours is, especially with WinME.

[Nycto]

Well, I just tried running an old graphics card that came with one of our earlier machines...eh, it's an STB Systems Nitro 3D/GX ED0 1.0. This time, when I boot the machine up under ME, the monitor will not detect the card. I guess either this card is also fried, or perhaps is too old for my machine.

I have the video card in my G4, but from what I understand, Mac and PC PCI cards are not compatible.

So it looks like I'll be heading out to a computer store to have this card checked. Once I'm positive it's dead, I'll look into getting another video card, and see if that resolves my problem.