Windows 7, total crap, new OP system recommendations?

[MED]

Uh, hmmm. I'll have to take a looky!

What's happening is the machine works fine for awhile but then the video display gets all wacky looking, multi-colored and speckled. No matter what monitor or drivers. Micro Center messed with it for weeks, finally throwing in the towel and giving my money back for the diagnostic work.

Could capacitors cause this? The PC doesn't die, just the display becomes unusable. Sometimes a reboot will fix it, but usually not. I haven't even hooked the bastard back up since MC gave it back.

Do you have integrated video or is it a card? If it is integrated, disable it If you have an AGP or PCI express expansion slot...put a cheap card in it. I put different video cards in the kids P4 XP era machines and they all worked well.

[rondog]

Do you have integrated video or is it a card? If it is integrated, disable it If you have an AGP or PCI express expansion slot...put a cheap card in it. I put different video cards in the kids P4 XP era machines and they all worked well.

Uhhh......

[Danimal]

Any of you computer savvy fellers work on them for hire? If so, send me a PM willya? Being unemployed I'm gimping along with an old corporate laptop running XP. Ain't much of a computer, but still works fine. It has a bunch of old corporate BS software cluttering up the drive that I'd love to get shoveled out. Basically a cleanout and tuneup, something to keep it alive until we can replace it. Not looking for free work, but affordable.

Also have a Dell desktop that's newer and better, but Micro Center says the motherboard is getting flaky and can't be fixed. I'm a total computard when it comes to working on them.

It sounds like your graphics processor is failing. First thing that I would do is pull the whole thing apart, blow all the dust off of everything and then clean and re-apply thermal paste on the heat sinks for the cooler. Depending on the age of the computer, the processor and the configuration of the mother board there are a lot of different things that could be going wrong with it. Thermal paste is like $1 and available at best buy and most computer stores. I would start there and then when it is not thermally shutting down then you can move to software related issues.

[Holger Danske]

It sounds like your graphics processor is failing. First thing that I would do is pull the whole thing apart, blow all the dust off of everything and then clean and re-apply thermal paste on the heat sinks for the cooler. Depending on the age of the computer, the processor and the configuration of the mother board there are a lot of different things that could be going wrong with it. Thermal paste is like $1 and available at best buy and most computer stores. I would start there and then when it is not thermally shutting down then you can move to software related issues.

Ive heard of folks using a penny (pre 1984 or whenever they changed to copper content) between the GPU and heatsink to fix flakey video issues. But it would be much easier to buy a cheap pcie card to replace the integrated graphics controller.

[Danimal]

Ive heard of folks using a penny (pre 1984 or whenever they changed to copper content) between the GPU and heatsink to fix flakey video issues. But it would be much easier to buy a cheap pcie card to replace the integrated graphics controller.

That was going to be my next suggestion, but if the mother board and PSU are a dust plug that wont last long either. I find that with 99% of the machines that I work on, getting proper cooling and thermal seating on the CPU and GPU makes all the difference for reliable operation and most of them have never been cleaned out ever. Then from there if the issues have not resolved themselves I look at hard drive issues because somehow they affect everything else no matter how unrelated they seem. Then as a final solution or to gain performance that the machine never had I turn to hardware. Start with a clean cool motherboard/CPU/GPU/PSU and any other problems will become easier to find.

[cfortune]

Uhhh......

Do you plug your monitor in the back of the computer near where all the USB ports and such are? Or do you plug it in below that in a more isolated area? Integrated meaning its built into the motherboard. If it's PCI(e), it'll be in one of the expansion slots below the other plugins. I'll post a picture of the back of mine in a sec to help explain further.