Display Meltdown

[meblumen]

For the last week or so periodically when using my computer, all of a sudden the display will either meltdown into this pixelated, line and square thing which worsens until I can't make out anything or it will start with my cursor turning into a square and then colors get funky and its more of the same business forcing me to manually reboot, sometimes losing unsaved work. I can't remember the motherboard I have but I'm running a Barton 2500+ CPU with 2 512MB sticks of RAM (although it only registers 1gig). I have 2 Western Digital HD and a Matrox Millennium G450 Dual Head video card. I'm using 2 monitors and it happens on both simultanously. I swapped one of them out to see if it was a problem with one of them but it happened to the replacement monitor too. I'm thinking it's my graphics card but I'm not very experienced in dealing with hardware issues (should say solving them) so any advice would be appreciated.

[Cricket]

Open the case and see if you need to clean out the dust bunnies from the heatsink fins, air vents and power supply vents.

I only use Matrox video cards and during this past summer (which was hotter than usual) I started to get video problems with my two G200s, a G450 and two G550s. All these video cards had passive heatsinks on them so to remedy the image problem I salvaged some 40mm fans from a few bay coolers I had and mounted these fans to the heatsinks with some small sheet metal screws. I cut and spliced on some 3 pin power connectors I had and hooked up the fans to the case fan headers on the motherboards. After this modification I haven't had any video problems since.

Cricket

[blue60007]

Yep, sounds like an overheating problem.