Bad flickering on bootup. Fine in windows. Help!

[wapcatlet]

I am trying to find a solution to a problem on a friend's PC.

When it boots up, the BIOS splash screen appears as usual. When it clears, the usual boot up messages appear but they are barely readable through the flickering white horizontal lines BUT as soon as the Windows loading screen appears, the screen stops flickering and everything looks okay.

Coincidentally (or maybe not), the PC now takes over 5 minutes to boot into Windows XP Home. The drive was reformatted last week and Windows was reinstalled but it has made no difference.

This is the PC specification:

MOTHERBOARD: Gigabyte GA P35-DS3L
PROCESSOR: Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 S775 2.2GHz 2mb Cache 800FSB
MEMORY: Kingston 2GB KIT (2X1GB) DDR2 667MHz/PC2-5300 CL5 Non Ecc 1.8V (KVR667D2N5K2/2G)
GRAPHICS CARD: MSI 8400GS 256MB DDR2 DVI VGA HDTV out PCI-E Graphics Card (NX8400GS-TD256E)
HARD DISK: Samsung Spinpoint 160GB 7200RPM S300 3.5" (HD161HJ)

Any suggestions?

 

[daship]

Guessing since the HDD has been formatted, the mobo is starting to die.

 

[wapcatlet]

Thanks daship. You might be right.
The same thought had crossed my mind.
I guess I was hoping that someone would have seen the same problem before and they would suggest something a bit less "painful" than replacing the mobo.

 

[wapcatlet]

Best answer selected by wapcatlet.