After I bought my new pc I gave the old one to my daughter to use for online games etc. anyway it's started having a few issues culminating in the following.

It would boot to as far as the XP logo and then say monitor going to sleep and it duly fell asleep, we just couldn't get as far as the sign in screen for the 3 users. ocassionally we would almost get there and then these fragmentented vertical lines would appear omn the screen and nothing else would happen no login screen.

I booted it last night and hit F12 and went into it via safe mode, got to the sign in screen, logged into my wifes user and then proceeded to transfer her entire photo album out and onto my portable hard drive taking over 2 hours with no issues, once done, rebooted the pc and tried to get back in via the normal route and again the ****** wouldn't load and sent the monitor to sleep.

Any ideas what may be causing this before I take it to the local pc repair shop ??

Thanks

FM

 

Like you say Funkii, it's probably the graphics card dying and it sounds like a safety feature when it's saying bye bye.I might be wrong though.

 

Might be worth checking that the heatsink and fan on the graphics card are free from being clogged with dust.

 

I gave it a brief "hoover" the other day.i'll remove the card and give it a proper clean and see if that helps

It was an after market card, If I can remember how I suppose I could remove it completely and revert to the built in graphics it came with ?
Cheers

 

Sounds like it could be heat that caused the issue or power requirements. Some newer GFX need the correct power input so might be that.

But more likely it's overheated at some point causing a problem on the card. While it's cool/out of games the dodgy component is either not used or a track/dry joint remains connected hence it works, later it heats up and the track/dry joint opens.

Booting into Safe Mode would not be driving the card hard as the proper card drivers are not being loaded and it's being run at a lower resolution. So the card is not being driven so hard, hence less heat and the fault does not occur. Safe mode is not taxing a card like a game would do.