My PC is scaring me

sjt269 · 13 Jan 2008 at 15:47

So...for about the last week or so, my PC has been doing some wierd things. Often when I'm on the internet or whatever, the screen just goes black. It doesn't go off though, since the light on the front doesn't go orange like it does if its not recieving a signal. I just get a black screen that doesn't go away unless I restart. It seems fairly spontaneous, and not linked to anything else I do.

Today, AVG decided to tell me that the 'Shell Extension' stopped working...it's back up again now after a restart, but it freaked me out a little that nothing could coax it back to life for a while - the 'Repair' button did nothing. Upon that restart, Windows Firewall went down and had to be started up again manually. I'm tempted to chalk this up to coincidence that two virus-related programs had errors within a few minutes of each other, but I've had problems with viruses etc before, and I don't want to take any chances.

On a possibly entirely unrelated note, CoD4 has started crashing at a specific point (4th or 5th mission in at the load screen) - possibly completely unrelated, but I can't fix that either. It just throws me out to the desktop. I've went back to an older version of Catalysts to try to fix this issue (didn't work) and am now back to running the latest version. No black screen so far (installed about 5 minutes ago...) but I'm not convinced it's gone.

Any insights will be much appreciated
tTz

Firegod · 13 Jan 2008 at 16:13

It could be all related I guess. CoD4 CTD could be a graphics/driver problem. Monitor going black but not losing signal could just be a corrupt driver and not like a duff card or anything. Shell Extension error, again, sounds like software issues.

Perhaps try a format, slipstream SP3 on to a Windows CD and do a fresh install. Re-install the latest and greatest drivers, then CoD4 and see what happens. This is what I have done a few weeks ago as my format was long overdue and so far, SP3 has been fine!

sjt269 · 13 Jan 2008 at 18:08

Well upon awakening my PC from standby mode earlier, I was greeted with a frozen screen. Restarted, and was then confronted with the Windows XP checkdisk utility checking the disk integrity. This is bringing back bad memories of hard drive failures etc, and my complete inetpitude with anything more technical than double clicking.

Also, a format always entails a lot of work updating things, and downloading things, and getting everything just the way I like it...I think I'll keep that as a last resort, but I'll definitely bear it in mind. Also, SP3? For Windows XP? When did that arrive?

sjt269 · 13 Jan 2008 at 19:48

Had the 'freeze on return from standby' thing happen again. I've went through the registry with CCleaner and tried to fix anything that could have been wrong in there (took a backup of the original first) to see if that was a cause, but it doesn't seem to have been.

Firegod · 13 Jan 2008 at 19:50

tTz said:
Well upon awakening my PC from standby mode earlier, I was greeted with a frozen screen. Restarted, and was then confronted with the Windows XP checkdisk utility checking the disk integrity. This is bringing back bad memories of hard drive failures etc, and my complete inetpitude with anything more technical than double clicking.

Also, a format always entails a lot of work updating things, and downloading things, and getting everything just the way I like it...I think I'll keep that as a last resort, but I'll definitely bear it in mind. Also, SP3? For Windows XP? When did that arrive?

SP3 is just RC atm (Release Candidate). But the beauty of slipstreaming it on to your new Windows CD is that there are no updates to run!

Basically you install Windows, your Hardware drivers (i.e. Graphics, Mobo, Soundcard, etc) and your done! Just have to spend time putting your software back on, which I actually enjoy doing because I usually find I accumulate a lot of junk which I never use. So by installing software again from scratch I find I can delete a lot of stuff.

sjt269 · 13 Jan 2008 at 20:44

Heh, I know...I had a few episodes in the summer where the PC would only last a few days before dieing and requiring a format and complete reinstall...had to redo the whole thing about eight times in the space of a fortnight before it finally decided to work. Got a new PC since then, though. There was me thinking no more formats required for a long, long time.

Another thing I just thought of that's been going wierd is Firefox. Text that should be blue seems to be coming up brown a lot of the time. My website (in sig) should have blue text saying 'Sidebar Menu' and 'Wise Words', but it appears brown, and it seems to be happening on Yahoo, Wikipedia, and most other websites too. If the text is a hyperlink, it'll turn blue after I've put the mouse over it (no clicking required). I also get wierd occassions where the top half of a word/line is one colour, and the bottom half is another colour.