Strange happenings with my media centre PC

[mrochester]

Hi all

Something very odd is going on with my media centre PC that started this afternoon. Whilst watching a recorded TV program, the picture will suddenly freeze, and then a second later the sound will stop. The TV will then just go to a blank screen showing the 'S-Video' label which means it isn't receiving a signal. The computer actually remains on all this time, and doesn't restart itself. When I hit the reset button, Windows will try to load, but after the green loading bar has gone and before the desktop appears, the screen goes corrupt and shows some vertical white bars on the top half of the screen.

To get it working again I seem to have to disconnect and reconnect the SATA cable to the hard drive. I have also tried reseating the RAM, graphics card and PCI-E TV card, but to no avail.

I'm not sure where to go now... unfortunately I don't have a spare PCI-E graphics card to try, and I don't know what else it could be anyway.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Michael.

 

[95thrifles]

It is sounding like the graphics card, as you suspect, does it have onboard gfx you can try using? Alternatively uninstall and reinstall drivers and possibly try underclocking the card using software

 

[mrochester]

You may be right there. The onboard graphics is DSUB only, so I've had to bring down a proper monitor as the TV is S-Video only. So far so good, I've been watching recorded programs for more than half an hour without another indicident. I'm going to butcher another computer for a graphics card so I can make doubly sure that a new card would fix the problem.