Techni-Color Screen of Death

joe_tlj

Distinguished
Dec 1, 2003
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Hey all,

I'm having the strangest problem. After leaving my PC off for a while and then booting up, the screen will go crazy. There are many small squares and lines of various colors aranged in a repeating pattern. This happens after the gray progress bar on the bottom of the page fills, and usually before the Windows XP loading screen apears.

However, if I go into the bios and just wait for about 30s and then boot up Windows, or press F8 before Windows loads and wait 30s, Windows will boot up just fine. This is a faily recent install of XP with SP2 and Norton IS. All my hardware is running on stock settings. I haven't installed any new hardware, and I've never had this problem before.

My question is, "What's causing my screen to freak out?"
 
sounds like a cold (warming up) issue - you know how when u first turn on monitors there black for a while?

either video or monitor, id say monitor, try hooking up a spare to your computer, or you monitor on another computer and find the cause wether it really is monitor.
 
I have this same problem, but it's not actually a problem.

I've started my computer up when it's like this, and when it gets to windows, the screen has returned to normal and there doesn't seem to be any problems. Regardless, I just reset my system if I see that and usually it gets corrected so I then go on with my business. I've seen it happen on two different monitors, so I think it has to do with my video card. I have an ASUS Radeon 9600 XT.

Anyway, it doesn't actually cause anything harmful, so I say just forget about it.
 
I hadn't considered the monitor... I'll have to try reseting the monitor next time I have the weird screen.

I begining to agree with whats-his-face, that it's the video card. I also have a radeon 9XXX series card, the 9800.
 
Ahh... Just noticed the handy feature on the bottom of the posting page here. Not what's-his-face, but Jaculum. Thats all staightened out.