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I've never seen anything like it before!


iWindoze

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I've taken to doing some computer work for extra cash lately and it's been working pretty good for me. This last Monday I and my business partner went to some guy's house who had a Gateway running WinXP Home with 640mbs of RAM on a P4. We had the devil's own time with it because it kept on freezing on us--we were barely able to transfer over his outlook express addressbook and his My Documents folder as it was.

The biggest issue was the way the screen kept on displaying strange characters in text mode. Once it got into Acronis or Windows it was fine (except for the freezing) but we kept on seeing strange corruption on the screen when we tried booting up Ubuntu, BeOS PE 3.5, Bart PE, and Windows setup. I managed to snap two pictures of the Windows setup screen with my Palm Zire 72... Does anyone have any idea what the 'eck we're looking at?

photo010708001yl6.th.jpg

photo010708002wa1.th.jpg

Is it some kind of bios virus? We checked the actual bios itself and that seemed fine--all words were in perfect English and the language was set to English. I keep thinging it almost HAS to be a bios virus--how else was it able to effect three different OSes? I don't see how it could be video card related...could it? It's a Nvidia Geoforce something..I forget now.

Any ideas?

--iWIndoze

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I had a similar problem when I overclocked my computer and I did not have proper cooling, but in my case BIOS letters were corrupted too, and I barely managed to return my normal speed. Maybe you should check if it is overclocked.

Cheers ;)

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Memory, processor, or video card problem. Also be sure to rest the BIOS to either defaults or if available Safe-settings.

He should have gotten a restore cd which should also have an option to run PC Doctor diagnostics from it. Test away on the hardware. Or swap out parts with known good.

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