Glitchy computer, start-up issues, BSOD

Hi there,

I've been trying to diagnose problems with my comp for a while. There are a few conflicting things going on, nothing too obvious, nothing too regularly, but enough to annoy me!

The main problem is a BSOD while I'm playing Civ IV. This happened both before and after I upgraded my video card, and as far as I can tell, I've updated the drivers for this too, although you may be able to disabuse me of this notion.

After I restart, the screen is very glitchy with vertical broken lines, and the start-up finishes not with a desktop, but with a screen full of monochrome blocks somewhat like a test card. I've bypassed this problem by either restarting with last-known good config (which sometimes works), or most recently by rolling the system back to the previous day.

Secondly, I've half a mind that I may have some malware in the background, partly due to friends receiving MSN Messenger spam from me (although not when I'm online), and I recently was unable to run and uninstall Ad-Aware, although I solved this problem today with a reinstall.

System details:

Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 3 (build 2600)
2.15 gigahertz AMD Athlon XP
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
256 kilobyte secondary memory cache

Board: nVidia-nForce
Bus Clock: 166 megahertz
BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, LTD 6.00 PG 09/24/2003

NVIDIA GeForce4 MX Integrated GPU

Also, I think I've isolated the source of the most recent crash, and the event log says:

"Driver detected an internal error in its data structures for ."

and

"0000: 00000000 00580001 00000000 c0040004
0010: 00000000 c0000018 00000000 00000000
0020: 00000000 00000000"

The source was "nvidesm".

Your help would be appreciated.

Thanks :yum

 

I just checked, and it appears my drivers are all up to date. Does this imply a hard drive error?

 

Thanks for the advice. How would I go about doing this?

I'll have a go later when I finish work.

 

Okay, I've changed the driver as suggested with no problem, and I then reinstalled Civ IV to check whether the glitches still existed, and oh gods, they certainly do. I set a system restore point before the installation, but rolling back to that doesn't seem to have helped.

Right now, I'm running in safe mode. I can't seem to get Windows to start normally, I don't know what to do next. Help! :cry

 

Okay, latest situation is that after running in safe mode for a while, I managed to schedule a chkdsk run on the next restart, and for whatever reason, the computer restarted without glitches on that occasion. The run took two hours, and the computer booted normally after that. There was no report waiting for me when I awoke this morning.

Would running a computer for a while in safe mode give it a chance to "get past" the glitches as it were?

Does this sound like anything any of you have experienced before, and if so, what do you think the problem is?

 

Latest news is that my computer won't run in anything but safe mode, and I can't get online in safe mode either for some reason where I could before.

Is this a problem that is defeating everybody? I'm out of ideas, and I'm not getting any clues from here either, but I would greatly appreciate some more advice.

Thanks.

 

Well, it looks like my hard drive is stuffed. If anyone has advice on what to do now, that would be nice, but I don't feel loved enough

 

Thanks for looking in. I've currently dismantled the tower, so I'll see if it runs any better while in the fresh air. Otherwise, I have offers from friends of replacements, so hopefully I'll get something sorted soon enough!