It started the first time while running World of Warcraft and speaking on Ventrilo. The screen froze in game and the graphics in the pic became hued with red and green snow and the audio in Ventrilo was stuck in about a half second loop just repeating what someone had began to say.
After restarting, I was able to get back into ventrilo, but as soon as I would try to start the game again, it would immediately freeze the same way. I assumed it was just WoW or a combo of WoW and Vent and planned to reinstall them.
But when I tried to restart a third time, I noticed that after the Windows load screen, where it usually goes black for a second before my blue Windows login screen pops up, the screen was flickering and covered with green snow. It took longer than normal to get the login screen to pop up. When it did and I logged in, I got to my desktop and everything looked fine. I was able to open up Firefox at first, but after a minute or so, the green snow covered the screen and my computer froze again. I tried Ctrl+alt+del and the windows/programs I had open became super sized, low rez, and lacking blue hues in the color. My mouse was unable to click on anything, and the only thing I could do was alt+tab to the task manager, then I could shut down the computer with the pull down menu.
Now, when I start it up, the windows load screen (black screen with the Windows logo), the screen has white lines about half an inch long all over (24" monitor, 1900X1200) while it is loading, then when it goes to the black screen before the login screen pops up, it has the green snow that sometimes freezes the computer there, sometimes it makes it to the login screen. If I get to the login screen and log in, my computer starts to load as normal, but freezes in green snow as soon as I try to launch a program.
One try it did produce the blue screen of death.
Because of the pixelation/snow, I was thinking maybe it is my video card. But there are enough other odd things that I wonder if it isn't something else, either another piece of hardware dying, or if the software is corrupted. I try to be very safe with this PC as far as viruses go, I do 99% of my internet surfing on my laptop and never to risky sites. My PC is generally for gaming and work, and I only use the internet when I need to download software updates for programs I already have, etc. The PC itself is about 2yrs old, so I can see hardware starting to wear out.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Derek
EDIT: Video card is EVGA Nvidia 8800GTX, have Intel Core2Duo (can't get on to remember speed), 4GB ram, Windows XP, Asus P5N32 SLI Deluxw MB.
Edited by Thrashnak, 19 March 2010 - 10:52 PM.