[negativedge]

I am sure some of you would like to see my computer stay dead, but I would rather it be alive, so I'm making this thread.

I was playing Stalker when the computer froze to a black screen. I restarted, and tried to play the game again. It froze again. I restarted again. The computer didn't feel like booting properly. I would get a black screen, sometimes with a pointer icon (that I couldn't move). The black screen would occasionaly flicker off and on again. Sometimes the computer would restart itself. I'd sometimes get far enough to get to the screen where I could get to the BIOS, so I got in there and found nothing meaningful. Sometimes it would even get to the Windows boot screen, and one time it actually played the Windows start up music and attempted to show by desktop icons, if not the wallpaper or the task bar. Then it went back to a black screen.

On the setup screen where I could get to the BIOS, it also gave me the option to go to the "boot menu" or to enter system recovery. Hitting the system recovery button didn't do anything, and entering the boot menu loaded a DOS prompt that wanted me to type in an administrator password in order to do anything. I don't have an administrator password. The BIOS let me set some password, but apparently it wasn't the right one.

One time the system recovery button actually worked. It prompted me to recover windows, which would set the windows setting back to factory default and wipe all applications and drivers while keeping all my data files and such. I did that, and Windows loaded. The computer went through all the set up stuff it did when I bought it, so I figured maybe it would start working. After I got through that stuff, the first thing I tried to do was reinstall my video card drivers so I could get the computer running in a resolution other than 2x1 or whatever hideous thing it was in.

Attempting to reinstall the video drivers put me back to square one, unfortunately. The computer boots to the black screen and did all the same non-stuff it did before.

So what's wrong, select button?

I mean, is the video card dead? I would think that a dead video card wouldn't load anything on the screen at all, nevermind a semi-functional fresh windows install. I can't test anything with the integrated shit card my computer came with, because my monitor doesn't have a VGA cable, and the integrated shit doens't have a DVI connector thing. Am I fucked, or is this something I can fix?

[LWJoestar]

For some reason, the possibility occurs to me that your RAM might be boned. Check your post messages to see if your system still thinks it has as much ram as is physically plugged into your board.

If you have two stick in, try rotating them (like crops; swap their slots. Don't like... flip them around and put them in upside down/backwards. They won't go)
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[negativedge]

I only have one stick of RAM, and the BIOS thingy recognized it, so I don't think that's it.

[LWJoestar]

Well, it's not that your bios being able to see it means it's GOOD. If your bios doesn't see it then it's definitely bad, but otherwise it could still be bad in many different ways.
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[negativedge]

Is there anything I can do to find out if the RAM is bad?

[LWJoestar]

But yeah, it could very well be your video card. It might have overheated or something.
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[Craptastic!]

[km]

[Craptastic!]