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Video signal, possible overheat corruption
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Posted by: DrOctopus
Let me start by saying I am relatively technology literate, so no need to overexplain. I built my own system,and I do a decent job of maintaining it.
My system specs:
Soltec motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 2000 processor
Swiftech heatsink (good ratings on Tom's hardware)
A-Open GeForce 4 TI 4200 128mb AGP video card
Western Digi 7200rpm 80gig HDD
Windows XP Pro SP1
Also running:
Spybot S & D
HiJack This
Trend Micro PCCillin antivirus
ZoneAlarm
Ad-Aware (freeware)
Here's my situation:
I was getting random reboots on my PC for a while, and i came to believe it was overheating (Athlon 2000 processor), because my BIOS heat sensor was showing pretty close to the shutdown temp. So I did a quick fix (I know its not smart), but I ducted the AC to the PC's front. The reboots pretty much stopped. I figured... problem solved until i have time to reseat the processor.
Yesterday when I woke up, my system didn't recover from sleep mode. I had to do a hard boot, and shortly after my desktop loaded, the video signal was lost (screen went blank and monitor light was flashing. I rebooted again, and the same video problem now happened during load. I turned the ducted AC lower and wait 15 minutes. Reboot and no problems. I figured it was a heat problem again.
This morning, The video was gone again, so I follow the same procedure and get my signal for a short time again. This time, I run Hijack This and look for new or unknown processes, no luck. I open my task manager, and don't see anything unusual. This leads me to believe that it is less likely a virus or malware.
I am pretty up to date on my antivirus, and ran it 2 days ago with no hits.
What I am wondering is, do you think this is a hardware or software issue. My best guess at this point, is that my PC overheated at some point, and corrupted something in the video driver, and when that operation is called, the signal is lost and not recovered. But if that were the case, why would I lose the signal before windows even loads?... it isn't using the driver at that point.
Unfortunately I don't have a spare video card to swap out, or other spare hardware to try. Does anyone have any suggestions, recommendations, or other experience with this type of problem?
Thanks for your input.
-D
Posted by: DrOctopus
Also, I have seen other articles on the forums mentioning some compatibility issues with new direct X stuff. I recently started the WoW open beta, and had to use the new direct X they supplied. However, it has been going fine for aweek... any chance this is the source?
Posted by: DrOctopus
Just attached the monitor to the laptop and no problems.. so it isn't that either.
Posted by: redwench
its really sounding like heat. what exactly is the temp of your cpu? if its over 50 at boot or 60 at any time, youll have to get that down significantly before you can do any more trouble shooting. you could have a bad hard drive, bad ram, bad motherboard, etc. no way to tell if youre overheating, so address that first if need be. and not with the ac 
oh, if youre overclocking or doing any other hardware tweaking, return to default settings.
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