Recently some BSODs have been cropping up in the

[Icarus]

Recently some BSODs have been cropping up in the middle of PC activity - usually when I'm fiddling around with two programs at once. Yesterday the machine took a few seconds to boot up, but right before the Windows welcome screen appears, I get a DOS screen filled with ASCII smiley characters.

At first I thought it was a virus, but went through all the AV, trojan and spyware checks, still there. As the BSODs were referring to the graphics driver (nv something dll) I rollbacked to a previous version, and now instead of the smiley faces I get an even longer boot time only to get 2-3 rapid BSODs, before rebooting.

Safe mode does work though, which leads me to think it's a graphics card problem? Just wanted to get some other opinions before I take further action.

[DaveTN]

Could be either graphics card or a memory module that has gone bad.
If at all possible, try the process of elimination technique that I use. Remove one of the memory modules and reboot. Of course things will run a little slower with probably half your RAM but try running things like you usually do. After giving it a go, swap out the RAM modules and see what happens. If you get the BSOD's during either run, then THAT is the bad module.
Graphis problems, particularly on laptops and tablets are a bit more difficult to troubleshoot since the graphics chip is hardwired to the motherboard.
Finally, ther is a possibility that it might be your hard drive too. One thing that I do is to remove the HDD and connect it to a USB adapter and then to another computer. I use various disk scanning tools to check the drive for errors. I also scan it for malware and virus's while connected to my shop PC.

Start there and let me know how it goes.

David

[Icarus]

If the sound is still playing ok whilst the screen is garbled, is it safe to assume that it's not a RAM or HD issue? Because that's what happened just now after installing the drivers (v46, well behind the 90-odd one I had before). Was doing fine running XP for a few minutes, then the screen had pinky green streaks.

[wallen]

Certainly starting to sound more like a graphics adapter problem. Is it still under warranty? You don't mention what machine you have.

[Icarus]

It's an M200, one of the first versions (1.5GHz Banias), so the warranty is long past. Seems like there's a loose part somewhere, if I keep it perfectly still (difficult when you're tapping the screen every few seconds) then it's fne, a small nudge and it hangs/shows the garbled lines.

[wallen]

That certainly sounds like a connection/joint issue. There are dismantling instructions here on the Buzz (or email me for specifics) if you want to pull it apart and look for the problem...