Garbled blue screen and crashing. Cause?

mks2005

mks2005

mks2005

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Friend is having some problems. The computer has been experiencing intermittent crashing problems (complete lock up, image on screen) - it will go for days without an issue and then it will return. We thought it might have been temps but they seem to be fine.

This was the most recent crash, and the first blue screen so far to come up:

http://img129.imageshack.us/img129/3345/s7004034xz4.jpg

Never seen it with garbled text before - I'm sure that's indicative of something?

There was an issue with the motherboard logo splash screen not coming up. Since this blue screen it now pauses for a long time on the splash screen (haven't got him to find out what's happening in the POST yet though.)

I got him to check PSU 12V rail, seems stable. Memory seems to be OK when tested. CPU temps aren't excessive.

It is however, an oldish rig. Athlon 64 3000+, Foxconn Winfast NF4SK8AA Mobo, Radeon X800, 1.5Gb GeiL, Akasa 400W, 2 old HDs.

So what's the likely problem? My money's on a dying hard drive or the motherboard getting screwy (which seems unlikely since the motherboard is only about a year old compared to the rest of the rig.)

Cheers
 
Last edited:
I don't think a hard drive could do that to the system, i.e the garbled text and distortion to the video, and especialy causing it to hang at the splash screen when posting. My likely guess a problem with the motherboard (even if it is newer than the rest of the system) since you are also having issues in POST with the splash screen. Is it stable enough to flash the BIOS to the latest revision to rule out any BIOS problems causing this?
 
Graphics card you say.

You're right, I guess video card could be to blame. I suppose it could be responsible for random crashes (although they didn't occur when the card was stressed though) and POSTing issues.

Anyone else had anything like this?
 
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