Can someone help me with my video problem

[jasonosaj]

Hi my computer is acting very weird. I have recently installed a game and after running it for just 20 minutes, my computer crashes. when i restarted my computer there were vertical lines covering my windows start-up screen. the color of my wallpaper was also changed, certain shades were outlined and did not display itself in the full spectrum that i did before. When i loaded the game (spellforce 2) the 3d characters were distorted, the entire landscape was also distorted.

The problem is less visible in my desktop when i lowered my color quality.

I really think that it is a problem with my video card because i also noticed that when i boot my computer and press delete to enter my computer settings, the display is distorted there too. I have already tried cleaning my video card but it doesnt work.

Can someone please help?

OS: windows xp  w/ service pack 2
Computer: intel pentium 4  with 512 ram
Display Adapter: Ati radeon 9600 series

[patio]

Heat , bad RAM, and power are the 3 most common causes of your symptoms...

Unless you have the wrong video driver installed...that's another possibility.

You said you cleaned the card...how did you do this ? ? Did you happen to clean out the rest of the case and components especially the CPU heatsink and fan ? ?

DLoad and run MemTest to rule out the RAM as a problem.

How old is this card ? ?

[jasonosaj]

Thanks Patio for those suggestions, however i cleaned my computer ( i removed the heat sink and removed a lot of dust, and cleaned all of the fans) and video card (by blowing away the dust and cleanign the connection with a rubber eraser) but the problem still persists. I also downloaded and ran Memtest for 1.5 hours but no problem was detected. is there anything else that i can do?

[patio]

Sure.

Regular Windows maintenence including Disk Cleanup and defrag...

Run all your malware protection scans...

Last but not least you might want to borrow a similar PSU and swap it in there to see if this may be the issue.

Good Luck and keep us posted.

[jasonosaj]

thanks patio i followed what u said and it works. thanks s bunch

[patio]

Good to hear you are fixed up and thanx for letting us know...