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Computer goes dark

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My specs:
Microsoft Windows XP
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU
6300 @ 1.86GHz
2.00 GM of RAM
ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series
Dell a computer

1. The screen goes black. The power button on the screen flashes orange when this happens, exactly like it does when the computer isn't turned on and the screen isn't getting a signal.
2. Sometimes the audio starts playing the same half-second of a sound over and over, sometimes the audio just turns off.
3. The computer won't respond to anything but a hard reset or holding down the power button to turn it off.
4. Sometimes just goes blue and says i have a virus but i scanned my whole computer and found nothing.

i like to watch movies while playing games if that helps
let me know if i need to upgrade anything

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Gman450 said:
In point 1 he says orange.

The orange is the power button when the screen goes black like it lost signal, not the actual screen going orange. My guess is either heat issues with the gpu or the psu going bad, but I would like to know more about this blue screen

Blue screen just says there was an error with hard drive and should scan for virus, i scanned and found nothing. also blue screen rarely happens.
the black screen problem happens when playing games. especially while watching videos at the same time. when the screen goes dark, my graphic card also reset.
whats gpu and psu? and can i upgrade them
hope that helps

gpu is graphics card, and psu is your power supply. what power supply and card do you have? i would like exact numbers if that is at all possible. download msi afterburner and watch your temps to see what is going on as well a update your drivers. sometimes blue screens are driver related too

your temps cant be up to date, you need to download a program such as i listed to monitor your temps to see where they are running at
you can get your numbers from your psu and gpu by looking at your hardware in the case.

on your start menu you should see a search box. type in dxdiag in there and it will tell you your system specs. if you dont know what you psu is, then most likely it is crap and might need to be replaced. did your gpu come with the pc you bought or did you upgrade it?

code147 said:
Max GPU Temp:84 C
CPU Speed: 1862MHz

Those temps are too high!
You'll be risking permanent damage unless you make it cooler.
Increase the fan speed of the GPU. ( use EVGA Precision or msi afterburner regardless of the manufacturer).
This is an issue of overheating GPU.

With afterburner go to the setting page and set a fan arc of 1 % fan speed for every degree celcius. Then click the gear icon next to fan control to activate it. You will hear your fan get louder. That should fix the issue

FlintIronStagg said:
84C isn't all that high under load, but if that is idle speed then yes that's your problem right there is the gpu

80+ regions for a GPU is still high.

Quote:
so when i fix the fan speed my problem should go away

It hopefully should.

Best solution

code147 said:
ok where do i go from here when i get to the fan tab page

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/20/unled2vs.png/

i just upgrade my graphic card last summer why did die so fast
and what about the psu do i still need to replace it
would getting more memory help also

That looks perfect. Go ahead and go back to the first page and you will see a little icon next to the fan slider that looks like a gear. Click it and your fan profile will enable. That's all you need to do just open afterburner when you boot up your PC and it should turn on automatically from then on when you open afterburner.
there are many things that can factor in to your card overheating including your case ventilation. It might just be a faulty card? If this trick with the fan works then you should be gtg. You can benefit from more ram but unless you upgrade your entire build you wont get the gaming power you want out of your current setup if that's what you are wanting to do. I would suggest an entirely new build if that's what you want to do.

so i just need to have afterburner running in the background.
so far still no problem with games but still have some pixels on some videos
if i upgrade this graphic card, would this problem come back again.

As they said, heat is causing the component(s) to become damaged.

You can change the Graphics Card, but that still won't fix the problem of the heat being there. Afterburner may be a neat trick that can help out no end, but a well built computer shouldn't need need afterburner tweaking things, the same way a healthy person shouldn't consistently need a doctor.

You ideally need more cooling. There are two routes:

Air
Liquid

I don't pretend to know very much about liquid at all - however as an air junkie with a minor wind farm running inside my system, I can happily say that a good aftermarket CPU cooler, a selection of extra case fans, a VGA cooler and thermal paste do the job brilliantly. However this will cool your system much less effectively if your case is badly ventilated.

If you go to websites such as Bitfenix, Antec, Silverstone, Coolermaster, etc. in the description for all of their mid/high range cases, they'll spiel off whole paragraphs about how well ventilated the cases are. It's honestly so important for any system, though nearly pivotal for air cooled systems. Water cooling will let you get away with less ventilation space, but you'll pay more and have to deal with fluid replacement every now and again (and to me, putting water into your PC is so counter-intuitive :p )

Anyways, good luck with your issue - I hope you sort it.

-Nih

code147 said:
so i just need to have afterburner running in the background.
so far still no problem with games but still have some pixels on some videos
if i upgrade this graphic card, would this problem come back again.

That depends on the next card you are buying.
This GPU, seemed to be a faulty one, unless you never had this problem before. This might have started happening when dust started piling up on the GPU. You should clean your case too. Dust can cause overheating as well.

A not properly attached heatsink to the GPU, can also cause overheating. And if you don't have good ventilation, then too. :) 

alright opened my pc today and saw a lot of dust build up in fan cleaned that up and a lot more. the fan even gives cold air now
Everything looks like its back to normal

also if i wanted to build up from this pc i already have where would i start? or is that not possible?

you could posibly upgrade to a quad core but as its a dell you may not be able to as dell rarely offer upgrade paths for there hardware. they would much rather force you into buying a full setup... they do this by limiting driver compatibility... such as not releasing vista or win7 drivers for machines that were sold with xp.
also they often put in a psu that barley covers the parts that are built in. so even if you do manage an upgrade you will often have to spend money on parts that you shouldn't need to... such as buying a gfx card then having to shell out for a powerful psu or motherboard because it either doesn't have enough juice or the motherboards pci-e is incompatible with newer hardware.
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