[help] VERRY VERRY strange problem with PC

Hey guys,

I have this really wierd problem with my PC and its

kind of worrying me. Yesterday I was sitting at my PC

playing around, when all of a sudden I heard my HD

stop spinning, and my whole screen went blank with

a bunch of wierd lines on it. Heres what it looked like:

Sorry for the really bad photo, it was dark

and I shot it with my cheap ass camera phone.

I thought maybe it was some kind of hardware conflict,

but I dont really know how to make sure. I reset all

the settings in the bios to their defaults and rebooted.

Everything seemed to be fine but tonight I went away

to eat dinner, and when I came back, the screen had

just gone all black, so I thought it had just gone into sleep

mode or something and I moved the mouse. Then the

same thing with the lines happened again. I have installed

new hardware in the past few days, I hooked my PC up

to my home network, and I also installed a USB cable

that I use to transfer data from my phone and back.

Anyone have any ideas ?

I hope none of my hardware is damaged

cause Im on a tight budget :S

Hobbes.

#241655

Looks like your moniter was hit / bumped. Same thing happened to one of my schools 50 inch flat plasma hdtv screens. It wasn't turning on, a kid tapped it rather hard on the side and the screen got the same type of display as yours. The school ended up replacing the screen.

Either that or your moniter cable might be not completly plugged in / might be damaged on the inside. Check this one first, if not, I hope you have warranty.

#241658

my old laptop did that when someone cut half of the monitor ribbon.

solution: make that budget even tighter :

#241659

noooooooooooooooooooo !!!!!!!!!

My beautifull monitor that I got for my bday !!!!! :'(

EDIT:

It cant be my monitor cause my HD wouldnt shut

down and it wouldnt work when I rebooted my PC

#241661

Maybe there was a power surge, and it look out both your HD and your video card at the same time...

#241667

I doubt it, The light didnt flicker or anything, and its never happened before.

#241673

So its probably your vid card. You should check the connections going to the mobo and out to the moniter. Maybe some are loose? My mouse used to work and then not work, i'd shake it a little and it'd turn off and then turn on etc. Check your connections outside of your pc case and within.

#241692

I'd start swapping parts with a friend of yours to isolate the problem. that includes monitor, (which should be easiest to swap), hard drive and power supply, among others. when you do get a functional pc, run memtest86+ on a boot disk to see if the memory has any issues, then go from there diagnosing problems

hope this helps

#241696

i think its your video card mate. 95% sure.

#241698

Great, vid cards are expensive I dont have any friends I can swap

parts with btw, and the thing seems to happen at totally randomn

moments so it would be hard to test.

#241716

I wouldn't be so sure anibalin. My comp did exactly the same thing just after a fan died. It turned out to be a combination of the dead system fan and a power supply that wasn't big enough to supply all the components.

#241733

Im 99.999 % Sure that all my fans are perfectly fine, but my power supply is really weak (barebone)

although Ive never had any problems with it whatsoever.

#241736

the power supply is probably one of the most underestimated parts of your computer, I wouldn't rule it out

if you really don't have any other parts to swap with, try a friends computer. I'm assuming you know how to take apart computers (generally) and put them back together again? if not, that wouldn't be a bad thing to try to learn. see if your parents or relatives have a swap shop that they can lend you parts to see what is the problem. if you have a compusa or pcfarm around where you live, try to see if you could go there and just get a quick diagnosis. anything at this point will do, even on a tight budget there are things you can do to narrow down what you have to look for. in the event you do have to buy a part, newegg.com is your place. its where I have built 3 computers (including my own) and soon to be 4.

see if you can grab a friends computer or even an older one thats cheap that has some similar things in it. (like an AGP graphics card). or if you're willing to drive to connecticut, you could find me hehe

good luck!

#241762

He already said he didn't have any friends who'd be willing to swap their comp parts with him.

#241942

Hmm, It just happened for the third time and now I noticed one thing, it ALWAYS seems to happen

when my USB phone cable is plugged in.

#242009

So leave your phone unplugged from the computer for a few days. Although I really doubt it's your phone test it out anyway.

#242016

the same thing happened to my HP iPAQ. I just did I hard reset (format) and It worked fine. I lost my stuff, but that didn't really matter because I didn't have much on it - it was only 3 weeks old.

PS: if your PC screwed up, how did you post this? Did you use a different one?

#242024

It works fine when I reboot.

#242109