Could it be the graphics card?

[Arfer]

Hi everyone,
I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit on a Dell Dimension E520 that has an Nvidia GeForce 7300LE Graphics Card.
Last night I installed an update from Nvidia and all seemed ok.Powered off went to bed and rebooted this morning.All still seemed ok and I opened WLM & Chrome, 10 secs later the system froze.So I held in the power button for 5 secs and the PC dutifully shut down. Tried to reboot,got past the windows splash screen but that was it, no login screen.Repeated this process 3 more times with same results.So I went into safe mode and all my system restore points were unusable.Tried to repair it rebooted and ran chkdsk,rebooted again,still the same.Tried the repair option again and it saw that windows had not started and listed disk corruption.So I ran chkdsk again and it came back fine but this time on the reboot the screen came up with masses of zeros. This continued on subsequent reboots so I got my disk out to reinstall.All was fine here until near the end of the install when it failed 5 times.Sooo out came a live linux distro which works fine ( I'm using it to post this)except the screen is low resolution and there are vertical purle and blue stripes outside of the linux gui.Have checked SMART on the HD and its Healthy and run CHKDSK and all is fine, no bad sectors.The only thing I can think of is that the Nvidia update shot my card.
Does this seem most likely to you guys ? Ps. I don't have another card to swap with!!
Look forward to your thoughts,
TIA,
Arfer.

 

[Tabbywabby]

I don't have much experience with failures except for my last Prebuilt PC fail. To make a long story short my mobo was dead. I have some quick suggestions to check if it is your GPU or other things. On the back of your computer, on you input / output plate you may be able to find some graphics connectors, like a DVI or an HDMI, if you have them on the back of the input output plate, plug your monitor into it, if you have the same problem then I would say that either your CPU or mobo is shot.

My other suggestion you should probably do anyway is to take it into a Best Buy, who from my expierince wont actually service it for you but will tell you whats wrong. You can take it into different places as long as they have a tech service center.

I know this is probably rather vague, but I don't know what else it could be.

 

[Cinders]

Usually when a CPU goes out it simply quits working; your computer might power up but nothing else will happen, so the CPU is probably intact. Colored lines or blocks on the screen after or during the boot process usually indicate a broken video card. If you get colored blocks on the screen before its driver is loaded then you probably do have a broken video card. If you don't want to buy another video card just to test your system then see if one of your good friends has a comparable card he'll let you borrow, but I think it's time for a new video card.

 

[Arfer]

Usually when a CPU goes out it simply quits working; your computer might power up but nothing else will happen, so the CPU is probably intact. Colored lines or blocks on the screen after or during the boot process usually indicate a broken video card. If you get colored blocks on the screen before its driver is loaded then you probably do have a broken video card. If you don't want to buy another video card just to test your system then see if one of your good friends has a comparable card he'll let you borrow, but I think it's time for a new video card.

Hi Cinders, thanks for the reply, have got a new graphics card on order for delivery tomorrow. Hopefully that fixes the issue, will post back and let you know

@ Tabbywabby you might want to read posts more carefully before replying..."I would say that either your CPU or mobo is shot." if that was the case then how was I able to post to this forum from the PC running a Linux Live Distro ???

 

[Arfer]

graphics card replaced and all is well in my world again

 

[Cinders]

YES! I'm glad to hear your time and money wasn't wasted.

 

[adject0604]

You can take it into different places as long as they have a tech service center.