| ATi 9800 Pro... odd issue
I have a radeon 9800 Pro video card on my gaming machine.
The other day the computer started acting funny... When I would start one of my favorite games, it would freeze as it entered the game. The whole machine. Done.
Then a short time later in regular programs like WORD, the cursor would turn into a square and only move left and right across the screen but not up or down. At first, I though it was a bad mouse, driver, something in the software I was using, whatever... NEVER in my dream would I have considered it to be my Vid.
Then, not to long after it started doing that... say about 15 minutes, the screen would FREAK OUT and look like a cross between a striped circus tent and the HAL2000 when it was p'd off at Dave.
My knee jerk reaction was VIRUS but with NOD-32 that isn't likely or much of a reality.
After a few restarts and the same problem continuing over and over, I began to see a pattern... TIME. It would freak at about the same amount of time after restart.
I reloaded Drivers, reset software, unloaded and reloaded my games... everything!
I was just about ready to wipe hte drive and reload windows when I though of something. The Video Card. I can't even think WHY I decided to look there but I did.
The 9800 Pro has a little FAN on the car tucked into a heatsink that is mounted directly to the main processor.
It had STOPPED running. Consequently, the chips would start to freak when it got hot. Luckily, this all happened while I was right there to turn things off and such so it never got BROKEN hot, but it would lock up the PC completely because of it.
I had an earlier model ATi car in a parts pile, a 6280 I think, that had the same fan. It's held in by three screws and the PS plugs right into the card... so I swapped the fan onto the 9800 pro and I've not had an issue since. Fixed, Fine, Finsihed.
Moral of the story, I guess, is that I had no idea that these symptoms were related to the Video Card but in the end, not only was it related it was the ONLY thing wrong. I was lucky in that my card didn't burn up completely but it sure COULD have.
S next time you have an issue like this, don't do like I did and rule out certain things because it doesn't make sense to you. You'd be surprised at what you might find.
I know I was.
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