Hey guys, I'm at a loss. I've had my system for 5 yrs, homemade and no serious problems until now. My video card recently went bad (ATI 9600PRO) and so in the process of determining this I noticed that the screen would blank (and the system would halt whatever it was doing) within 2 mins of turning the computer on. This 2nd problem didn't occur at the same time the video card went bad, it happened about a few weeks afterwards.
I went ahead and got a new video card, which fixed the initial graphics problem but the screen blanking is still continuing. This even occurs if I'm in the BIOS setup screen, trying to see if maybe something screwy happened.
So now I effectively can't even use the system, it doesn't matter if I boot it in Safe Mode and as I mentioned with the BIOS screen, it doesn't even matter if windows has been loaded. I have a battery backup so it's hard to believe that the video card and motherboard got fried somehow. I tried about 8 times in a row to at least attempt to backup some things on the main HD, as I'm thinking I should just wipe the thing and reinstalling everything. But with it blanking out even in the BIOS screen, I'm wondering if it would do any good or if I'd be wasting a lot of time and effort.
The only other thing that happened during this time was that iTunes locked up and I had been trying to reinstall it during the time I was using the bad video card (the bad video card had constant and animated artificing all over the screen, really annoying). I seriously doubt iTunes had anything to do with it but it's the only other problem I can think of that occured.
Any help in narrowing down the problem would be greatly appreciated.
-Dae
I went ahead and got a new video card, which fixed the initial graphics problem but the screen blanking is still continuing. This even occurs if I'm in the BIOS setup screen, trying to see if maybe something screwy happened.
So now I effectively can't even use the system, it doesn't matter if I boot it in Safe Mode and as I mentioned with the BIOS screen, it doesn't even matter if windows has been loaded. I have a battery backup so it's hard to believe that the video card and motherboard got fried somehow. I tried about 8 times in a row to at least attempt to backup some things on the main HD, as I'm thinking I should just wipe the thing and reinstalling everything. But with it blanking out even in the BIOS screen, I'm wondering if it would do any good or if I'd be wasting a lot of time and effort.
The only other thing that happened during this time was that iTunes locked up and I had been trying to reinstall it during the time I was using the bad video card (the bad video card had constant and animated artificing all over the screen, really annoying). I seriously doubt iTunes had anything to do with it but it's the only other problem I can think of that occured.
Any help in narrowing down the problem would be greatly appreciated.
-Dae