Problems with monitor/graphics card

[Vanyelash1]

So here's the deal. My computer has been in storage for about three months now. I just got back to college from the summer and hooked the whole thing up. The first night I had it going, my computer froze on me. I assumed it was a cpu/mouse/keyboard freeze. When I rebooted my computer, my boot screen came up and it had colored lines through the Dell logo and various alphabetical characters across the screen. It continued to freeze as soon as the windows XP was loaded. My monitor would shutdown and say that it was working but receiving no signal. The only thing that fixed this was rebooting, but it would do the same thing as soon as windows reloaded. I hooked the speakers up and I can hear the windows boot up after my monitor stops receiving a signal, and I can randomly click with my mouse and hear the action perform. I was able to pull up one of my music files and it played fine. THe only problem was that I was not able to see anything while doing this. This made me think it a monitor/graphics card issue. They're both factory issued. My card is an Nvidia Gforce 3300 (I believe) and the monitor is a trinitron. At this point, I can load windows for about 5 minutes and then a blue haze comes over the screen and the monitor freezes again. I reboot and the characters and colored stripes run through the boot screen. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have no access to another monitor, though I do have an svideo outlet if anyone knows if I could use my tv with that in place of a monitor to test it, not sure if my current card is capable of that. I would rather not buy one or the other (monitor/card) and it end up NOT being the problem. Thanks much in advance for ANYTHING!

 

[Sharkfood]

Definately sounds like the videocard has some issues.

I'd pull the PC apart and verify if the fan on the videocard is working properly. As the PC was stored, it's possible the fan has frozen up from the inactivity time and this corresponds to the time involved before it starts acting up. You might be able to give it a "helper spin" to get it going once again, but eventually may need to either replace the fan and/or videocard if it's just hung up.