Yellow Vertical Lines on Montior, Freezing at Start Up...

[Kyrielle]

About 1 week ago I started up an MMO game called "Pirates of the Burning Sea".  The game ran fine for 2 days.  On the start of day 3, the game locked up and my computer almost froze with faint yellow rectangles peppering the monitor.  I say "almost froze" because the mouse cursor would move a little bit every minute or so.  I hardbooted the computer and tried the game again.  The same hang up happened.  I went to restart the computer and found I could not boot the computer past the Microsoft loading bar screen.  I could start the computer in Safe Mode, but not normal mode.  Everytime I tried to boot into Normal Mode, after the BIOS screen, the monitor had faint, yellow, vertical lines going up and down the screen.  I could also hear something grinding in the computer tower before the computer froze.

I went into Safe Mode and uninstalled my graphics driver, thinking that was part of the problem.  I then rebooted into Normal Mode just fine and installed a new graphics driver from NVIDIA (my card is a GeForce 8500 GT).  This worked, for the most part.

Several days ago the monitor started to flicker black and later turned itself off.  I turned off the computer for a while and when I turned it back on, it seemed to be working again.  Except last Saturday the original problem came up again.  This time when I tried to reinstall the NVIDIA drivers, I kept running into a phsycial memory dump blue screen.  The file the screen was having problems with was one of the main pre-installed NVIDIA driver files on the system.  I then attempted to recover the computer to factory settings using the hard drive.  This did not work as the installation cannot complete in Safe Mode, and yet the computer cannot boot into Normal Mode.  This evening I spent time with a technician trying to diagnose the problem.  We ruled out the Motherboard and Hard Drive as they appear to be working properly.  We also did a memory test that completed without errors, but I am not sure what exactly the memory test is testing: the graphics card memory or the RAM memory?

Can anyone help me?  Is this problem a result of an overheating graphics card?  Or is the problem with the RAM?  Can this be fixed with recovery disks?  Or will I have to buy new hardware of some sort?

[Seattle_Mike]

My wifes Pavillion using a NVidia 8400 is doing basically the same thing.  It is looking like a video card issue from what I've been researching.  I hate to buy a new card without knowing for sure.  In Safe Mode the display looks fine but if I bump up the resolution, I get the yellow vertical lines.  When booting, it gets the blue screen with a dump but it's so quick it's hard to read it all.  It looks like a video card error however from the text.

Anyone else have the same issues or a fix?  I downloaded a new driver but it didn't help any.