Random garbled screen

[sloth85]

This recently started to happen. Randomly the screen would just become garbled when my computer is on. I took a photo:

The sound keeps playing if I'm playing a song or something on my computer, but otherwise I can't do anything else and I have to hard reboot. Of course this frequently damages whatever files I have opened at the time and am working on. There has been no recent hardware changes. Only change I can think of is I upgraded from Windows Vista SP1 to SP2 recently.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+
NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 - PCI Express
4GB DDR2
Windows Vista 64-bit Home Premium SP2

 

[Marnomancer]

Hello, sloth85.
Firstly, I assume this is happening system-wide, and not just 1 app, so correct me if I'm wrong.
There are a few possible causes to this.
1) GPU/CPU Overclocking: Instability, data corruption, etc. OCing beyond safe levels cause this problem. If you don't know what overclocking is, you probably haven't done it, so then ignore it.
2) GPU/CPU Overheating: needless to explain, this is the most common scenario.
3) LCD damage: Dead pixels, dying films, and whatnot.

If you can check these out individually, like hooking the LCD up to another PC to see if it's fine, or monitoring the temps, we may have a clue to what to look out for.

Regards,
Marnomancer