video and boot problem

[donsopp]

Hi

was called by a friend yesterday to say that he could only boot into safe mode and that the display looked really strange. When I looked characters on the screen during boot were alternately white and orange although at one point during boot the characters were uniformly white. ON entry to windows safe mode there were evenly spaced vertical lines on the screen.

He says this happened quite suddenly, that he was not on line and it happened after his wife had processed some pictures from their Olympus digital camera.

It is not so long since I replaced the video card in his machine. The card I replaced was filling the screen with garbage (random pattern of Pixels) but was fine with the new card. Is the new card starting to do the same as the old card? Machine has an Iwill mother board with 500MHz AMD, 128MB Ram and the graphics card currently in the machine is a Gforce2 Nvidia with 64MB video RAM

Help, I can't figure this one out

[Alienware_Dude]

Swap out the video card with a known-good. That sounds like either a bad video card or a bad mainboard.

[donsopp]

furhter info on this proble. During the POST screen when it reports the hardware the display goes into a perfectly normal black background and white text. Immediately after it goes to the alternate orange and white lettering then win98 opens and there are vertical lines on the screen at regular intervals. Tried a different monitor with same result but don't have spare video card. Ran a diagnostic sotware package and when it tested the page memory of the vga card it said it was expecting value of 55h and seeing 54h with a report of memory fail.

Think something elsewhere is affecting the vga card which is less than 3 months old.

[Heon2574]

Run a virus scan here.

You never know what else is on those memory cards.