Hope this is the right forum. Since my problems seem to be graphics-related, sticking it here 
My setup:
P4 3.0GHZ Prescott CPU, no overclocking
ASUS P5GD1 ATX LGA775 915P DDR Mobo, BIOS V1.7.1.56
MS Windows XP Home, legit copy, fully updated
ATI Radeon X800 XL 256mb PCI-E graphics card
BenQ DVD +RW
Kingston HyperX PC3200 1gb 2x512mb RAM
OCX 1gb RAM (Don't recall exact specifications)
Samsung Spintoin P Series 200gb Hard Drive
Antec Sonata Quiet Case (Awesome case, btw)
For background programs, I'm only ever running ATI Catalyst (newest drivers), Zone Alarm, my printers dormant programs, and whatever WinXP is running. I routinely run anti-spyware and anti-viral programs, but don't have them going all the time.
The initial problems were having World of Warcraft freeze, and I'd get a buzzing sound through my headphones. It required a hard reboot to get the computer going again. I updated to the newest version of Catalyst and the newest ATI drivers, and that allowed the VPU Recovery Console to sometimes catch the error, and keep the computer running. I thought it might be a heat issue, so I popped the side of the case off, and ran a small housefan into the case. Not sure it helped much, but things quieted down for a bit.
As of today, things have gotten way, way worse. When I boot the computer, there's graphical anomolies right from the first screen. Where's faint white vertical lines covering the entirety of the background of the boot screen, and portions of the letters are bright white, instead of the regular greyish colour. The second screen (where it shows the IDE scan) has a ton of left-opening perenthesis, like: ). A lot of the letters are getting garbled, being the wrong ones. T becomes |, S becomes {, etc.
Once, after booting into windows, the monitor reset itself, and showed a partial light blue bar at hte top, and a field of diagonal gold lines (top left to bottom right). The mouse cursor also went gold. I didn't test anything at that screen, I just hit the power button asap.
When I try to load World of Warcraft, the account login screen is completely thrashed. There's large blocks of blue at the top (including moving sections that follow the normal cloud-movement pattern), jagged artifacts all over, and stemming from the central area is what looks like a lightning bolt, going diagonally left and then right. Flickering errors elsewhere on that screen as well.
Oblivion also displays similar graphical anomolies at the boot screen for the game.
In 13 years of troubleshooting computers, I've never seen anything like this. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.
My setup:
P4 3.0GHZ Prescott CPU, no overclocking
ASUS P5GD1 ATX LGA775 915P DDR Mobo, BIOS V1.7.1.56
MS Windows XP Home, legit copy, fully updated
ATI Radeon X800 XL 256mb PCI-E graphics card
BenQ DVD +RW
Kingston HyperX PC3200 1gb 2x512mb RAM
OCX 1gb RAM (Don't recall exact specifications)
Samsung Spintoin P Series 200gb Hard Drive
Antec Sonata Quiet Case (Awesome case, btw)
For background programs, I'm only ever running ATI Catalyst (newest drivers), Zone Alarm, my printers dormant programs, and whatever WinXP is running. I routinely run anti-spyware and anti-viral programs, but don't have them going all the time.
The initial problems were having World of Warcraft freeze, and I'd get a buzzing sound through my headphones. It required a hard reboot to get the computer going again. I updated to the newest version of Catalyst and the newest ATI drivers, and that allowed the VPU Recovery Console to sometimes catch the error, and keep the computer running. I thought it might be a heat issue, so I popped the side of the case off, and ran a small housefan into the case. Not sure it helped much, but things quieted down for a bit.
As of today, things have gotten way, way worse. When I boot the computer, there's graphical anomolies right from the first screen. Where's faint white vertical lines covering the entirety of the background of the boot screen, and portions of the letters are bright white, instead of the regular greyish colour. The second screen (where it shows the IDE scan) has a ton of left-opening perenthesis, like: ). A lot of the letters are getting garbled, being the wrong ones. T becomes |, S becomes {, etc.
Once, after booting into windows, the monitor reset itself, and showed a partial light blue bar at hte top, and a field of diagonal gold lines (top left to bottom right). The mouse cursor also went gold. I didn't test anything at that screen, I just hit the power button asap.
When I try to load World of Warcraft, the account login screen is completely thrashed. There's large blocks of blue at the top (including moving sections that follow the normal cloud-movement pattern), jagged artifacts all over, and stemming from the central area is what looks like a lightning bolt, going diagonally left and then right. Flickering errors elsewhere on that screen as well.
Oblivion also displays similar graphical anomolies at the boot screen for the game.
In 13 years of troubleshooting computers, I've never seen anything like this. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.
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