-= Gametoast.com =-

Last night, a storm passed by while me and my parents where asleep.
Aperenty there was a surge, and the computers shut off.

When I started my computer back up, the monitor display was flickering, and glitchy, also It was allitle slow to respond to changes in scenery.

I thought That the strom had frazzled the monitor, so I got anouther old monitor out of the basement.

The problem still continues, so I figure it must be a problem with my computer.

My computer is fairly new, barely a year old.

T6532 Dsktop PC

Microsoft Windows XP
Media Center Edition 2005
Preinstalled

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Processor
2.2 GHz | 512 KB L2 Cache
2000 MHz System Bus

Video
nVidia GeForce 6100 GPU

Hard Drive
200 GB

Memory
1024 MB DDR SDRAM Dual Channel


Anyone know what this could be caused by?
A diagnosis or advice maybe?

It seems worse then I thought, it takes all my computer has just to play SWBF2.
It took me like 5 minates to load a map just now.

Right click on the task bar and start up task manager and see what it says for memory usage etc.
Also check to see how much hard drive space you have left. What was running when the power surge
happened? It may have corrupted something that is affecting your computer.

The only Program that would have been running was me exploreing my mod folder, and a loged off x-fire
and I still have about 70 GB free.

If the computer is doing nothing, or conversely if you are doing nothing on the computer does CPU usage drop to near zero. That seems like a lot of CPU usage to just check how much space is left on a drive. Also is this XP or Vista? Another thing to look at is go into hardware manager and see how much ram it reports on your video card it is possible the surge may have zapped that memory which may attribute to the flashing you were seeing. These are all just theories. If you have another video card I would suggest just trying to swap it but I am pretty sure you don't have a stack of them lying around.

My dad belives its my video card.

When I'm doing nothing, the CPU usage drops to almost nothing. I had GT up when I took the picture.
Its an XP

I'd take it to somewhere, that's how mine acted before the crash.

Not that I am saying anything bad about your comp but as an observation you must have something that's chewing up a lot of memory. Here is my task manager thing. This is with Gametoast up, doing a munge and Battlefront minimized (oh and I think the computer was making coffee as well )



The only real difference is I have a dual core but that shouldn't affect memory usage too much. Regardless of all that I would take Fusion's suggestion and take it to someone, preferrably where you purchased it, and they would be able to tell pretty quick if it is the video card or if there is something else going on.

I do run a few things that are pretty hoggy, the object dock for instance, but I've been running that for weeks without issue.

We also have a theroy that it might be a problem with the mouse, as the flashing/flickering only ocoors when the mouse moves.
The problem is, none of the other mouse(s) that we have lying around are working with my computer.

The one I have been and still am useing is a Belkin Infared/laser gameing mouse that uses plug & play USB-ness.

The other two mouse(s) we tryed plug into the regular mouse port, like the keyboard. But my computer does not recognise them.
I tryed adding hardwere but that did not work eather.

Hmmm it might also be a bus problem, do you have other USB devices like a joystick or a IPOD even a memory stick might do. Try plugging one of those in and using it or access it if it a IPOD see if that causes a flickering too.

it seems that the mouse isn't the problem, I managed to get a non USB mouse to work, its the same kind of thing.

And its not the USB ports, I unplugged all of my usb devices and its still flickering.