[vjhalai]

Hello, I have been having an issue with my computer just recently. When ever i start up my pc everything looks fine but within seconds the screen turns into a dancing pixel rainbow. I think these might be called artifacts but i am not sure. It is so bad that i cannot see anything behind the mess. I searched on google using another comp and i found that i may need to take out the graphics card and clean it. So i took it out, cleaned it, put it back and booted up my pc. It worked great for about an hour but then it went to hell yet again. When the system starts up it sounds normal. Its just the video part that is screwed up. I got a couple of error messages, one was an ati error message that said the VPU was failing (what does this mean?) another message i got was on a blue screen that said there was a problem with the ati2dvag file. I then booted into safe mode where i unistalled all ati drivers, when i restarted it made no difference, the screen went into a frenzy of patterned pixel crazyness.

is my video card on the way out? Btw i have a 5 year old dell dimension 4600
I am running windows xp
Pentium 4 2.8ghz processor
1 gb ram
Ati Radeon 9800 pro 128 mb
Also should I be leaning toward a new computer?

[4D(Fordy(Ford) Ollie]

Originally Posted by vjhalai

Also should I be leaning toward a new computer?

Yes.

Five years old - whatever the spec, yes it should be updated or completely renewed.

Sounds like it was pretty decent back in it's day though, hell it's got a faster proccessor than my current one (although I am OCing it as we speak - I may have just overtaken you )

It's just, in my opinion, it's hardly worth fixing something that old wihout very good reason.