Hey all, so I am having something of a crisis at the moment. This morning I was playing WoW, and just as I zoned into an instance my system hard locked. Ctrl alt Del did nothing, and it was totally unresponsive for 5 minutes before I held down the power button to turn it off. It's not the first time this has happened, but usually it has just unfrozen after a minute or so.
I left it to rest for 5 minutes, thinking it might have perhaps overheated or something (though I have not had this happen before - can never be too careful), however when I turned it on again, I saw vertical red lines appearing in clusters on my screen. "Uh oh" I thought, as this seems to be a sign of a GPU problem. On the next startup screen I got a load of green dots all over the screen, and these visual artefacts continued right up until the "starting windows" screen. It did the flashy coloured windows logo thing, and all the while things seemed normal aside from the artefacts. However after this the screen went blank (a black screen to be exact) as it usually does for a few seconds, but nothing further happened. It just seemed to lock up on a black screen and after a few seconds the hard disk activity light went out and only came on again periodically for perhaps half a second at irregular intervals.
Nothing happened, so I had to hold down the power button again - this keeps happening now, so essentially the computer won't boot beyond the windows logo. I tried a startup repair, and it got to the "performing repairs" bit, but then after 5 minutes or so it said "Unable to effect repairs" and all I could do then was restart it - it still wouldn't boot.
I was able to boot in safe mode, (but I still had the red artefacts on the desktop, even in SM) and in there I disabled the video card in device manager. Now, the system will boot up normally (outside of safe mode) albeit with no video card. I still get the red artefacts however, both on the desktop (though curiously not on toolbars / over windows or anything like that) and on the bootup screens such as the Intel logo and the starting windows screen - those are covered in red dots, clusters of red lines and green dots - even with the GPU disabled.
The monitor is a BenQ 19" and less than 6 months old - it has been working perfectly up until now, and the fact that it flat out wouldnt boot until I disabled the GPU suggests that it isn't a monitor problem.
What do we think?
I left it to rest for 5 minutes, thinking it might have perhaps overheated or something (though I have not had this happen before - can never be too careful), however when I turned it on again, I saw vertical red lines appearing in clusters on my screen. "Uh oh" I thought, as this seems to be a sign of a GPU problem. On the next startup screen I got a load of green dots all over the screen, and these visual artefacts continued right up until the "starting windows" screen. It did the flashy coloured windows logo thing, and all the while things seemed normal aside from the artefacts. However after this the screen went blank (a black screen to be exact) as it usually does for a few seconds, but nothing further happened. It just seemed to lock up on a black screen and after a few seconds the hard disk activity light went out and only came on again periodically for perhaps half a second at irregular intervals.
Nothing happened, so I had to hold down the power button again - this keeps happening now, so essentially the computer won't boot beyond the windows logo. I tried a startup repair, and it got to the "performing repairs" bit, but then after 5 minutes or so it said "Unable to effect repairs" and all I could do then was restart it - it still wouldn't boot.
I was able to boot in safe mode, (but I still had the red artefacts on the desktop, even in SM) and in there I disabled the video card in device manager. Now, the system will boot up normally (outside of safe mode) albeit with no video card. I still get the red artefacts however, both on the desktop (though curiously not on toolbars / over windows or anything like that) and on the bootup screens such as the Intel logo and the starting windows screen - those are covered in red dots, clusters of red lines and green dots - even with the GPU disabled.
The monitor is a BenQ 19" and less than 6 months old - it has been working perfectly up until now, and the fact that it flat out wouldnt boot until I disabled the GPU suggests that it isn't a monitor problem.
What do we think?
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