vertical green bars on monitor

I am running an intel celeron 555 and windows xp. I can boot to xp, but as soon as it gets that far, I get vertical bars in different shades of green and ctrl+alt+del won't shut it down. It started slowly, it would take about five full minutes to get to that point, then graduated to where it's hitting the green bars immediately when everything loads. I replaced the power supply because the fan had stopped running, and I thought that maybe the heat was affecting the video card. Even with new psu, green bars. What can cause this?

 

Ive seen that with bad ram or blended sticks of ram, check your ram. Download memtest86 from here and run it.

 

NOt blended sticks, I'm sure of that; bad ram could be. more likely that than vid card?

 

that can be caused by heat...and is usually permanent. So yea, try either getting ahold of some working RAM(or try one stick at a time) and video card and test those. I tend to think it's the video card. Make sure your computer has lots of ventalation as heat is the most likely cause of your problem.

 

Could also be the mobo itself - I talk from past experience. My PC did exactly as you describe and eventually the thing died completely and I had to replace the motherboard. Everything else is still running today more than two years later.

But I hope yours is something simple like the RAM.

 

It's not ram, that I know. when I couldn't install the drivers for the new vid card I figured I had an OS problem. I've reinstalled the OS and the problem is back, only today the bars were blue instead of green. I'm going to try once more with the new vid card, and then if I still have that problem, I'll figure it's the motherboard. I'd love to move up anyway...


By the way, when I go shopping for a mobo/cpu combination, if what's there now is Intel, do I need to stay with intel for compatibility with the rest of the hardware? It's a stupid question, probably, and I tend to think that I could go with AMD as long as I go with the compatible combination of mobo/cpu, but I've never gotten that deep into hardware.

 

The only parts that might not be compable with an AMD mobo would be the RAM, if it is DDR2 but it probably isn't if you have a fairly old machine.this has nothing to do with amd/intel but the video card could use a different slot, pci-e or AGP

 

but if the new mobo has onboard video, then the vid card becomes a spare part.

Right?

 

onboard video is crap, if you ever want to play games you need a good video card, i would highly reccomend getting a 6600gt or better video card.even if you aren't a gamer at lest get a mobo with a pci-e slot incase you ever do need to upgrade.

 

My own two cents of advice? Go Radeon. But It's all up to you. I find Radeon's tend to be a little cheaper than Geforce.

 

My own two cents of advice? Go Nvidia. But It's all up to you. I find Nvidia tends to own ati, unless you are getting thier new gpu what is it the x1900xt or some thing like that, I dunno, I have know idea how the ati cards stack up because I have been using nvidia for the last couple years.