Be Excellent To Each Other

My PC keeps freezing up.

BIOS says temperatures are 59 CPU and 49 case.

Does it freeze if you leave it sat in the BIOS?

Those temps seem within tolerable limits

That's fine. Give all of the components (RAM, GFX cards etc) a wiggle.

I'll try that.

Inside of computer smells faintly of Scalextric controller.

Mmm, ozone!

Or burnt dust...

Probably the latter, I had to take the side off the other day to wiggle the HDD things as it wasn't booting & I thought it was because it might have gotten too hot after being on for three days & I didn't replace the side until yesterday.

Display just went on one monitor, and the other one went all crazy flickery. Could be a dying graphics card?

And it is hanging again now. Can't even make the lights on the keyboard turn on and off. KC, am I still online on msn?

Fucking great, this is all I need. To the freecycleotron!

Could be. Does your PC have onboard graphics?

I have a Radeon 9800 Pro.

Is that the only option though. Does the back panel of the PC have another monitor output? Usually blue?

It does, but that doesn't appear to work. I've unconnected one of the monitors to see if that helps. Whole thing smells a bit Scalextric-y still.

The onboard wont work while the radeon is plugged in. Yank it and try again

Bios puts a full load on your CPU. S0 59 is quite high but you had an older CPU yes? Like a P4 Northwood or something? so that would be fine. My Phenom reports 52c in bios.

Have you tried switching the actual monitors around?

I don't know if it's possible for one head of a GPU to die but hey, could be on it's way out.

It's running from the Radeon on one monitor, for 8 minutes so far. Fingers crossed. Missing 2nd monitor already. I *think* I've a 9500 Pro up in the loft but i dunno. I might have chucked it away.

Dawn of war loads up then the screen goes blank. Just reset the computer and screen resolution appears to be different. I think gfx card is dying.

Sounds like it. It's had a good innings though

Want to tell me which AGP card to buy fr much cheapness?

you might have to trawl ebay. I'm not they're still making AGP cards brand new.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/XPS-5150C-Require ... 27afa83108

Is worth considering. It's very small.

You might have to use your l33t skillz to hold the hard drive in as it doesn't have the caddy.

How does that help when he is after a graphics card?

Yeah just get yourself on ebay and look at some of the later AGP cards. They'll be far better than your 9800Pro and will cost about 10 pence.

Are you joking? I will have whatever you are on this morning. I think someone has spiked your coffee.

What the hell?! He wants £8 for a Voodoo? Is that real?

Something spicier.

http://videocardshop.co.uk/product.asp? ... -T73D-UAL3

Rawr ! a very capable AGP card. Who'da thunk it? 1gb lol.

http://videocardshop.co.uk/product.asp? ... -465X-ZPF2

I found a card in the loft, it appears to work so far...

It would make the PC work. And it's cheap. I'm thinking out loud so ner.

BSOD now. Looks like I'll have to stick my hand in my pocket now. Thanks, JC, you have been most helpful.

That PC wont run your dawn of war. It's a cheap replacement though. It does have PCIE but only low profile. Hell, it's pretty much a working PC for £60 with a half decent CPU and ram in.

Remember though the hard drive needs to be SATA I think. I don't know if that even has an IDE controller.

I went out to maplins and bought an NVidia Trnado GeForce FX5200 256Meg.

Worst GPU ever.

Still, if it plays your game for you then you should be sorted

I imagine it probably wouldn't, as it's 3.3V based, and you usually can't physically insert 3.3V cards in to the more modern slots (AGP 4X and 8X)

Medieval Total War doesn't work now. I found instructions to fix this (something to do with drivers) but it does not do anything. Now I'm sad as I wanted to play castles as well.

I fixed it. The red terror sweeps Europe once again.