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My HP Desktop Pavilion Media Center m8277e has, as of Dec 23rd, been absolutely inoperable. It started as I was playing BF2, where my screen froze and my headphones got a horrible screeching noise that lasted about a minute, then the game returned to normal play. I Alt+Tabbed out of the game to see what had happened, and i got a message saying that my Display card had just recovered from a serious error. I rebooted the comp, and started playing BF again, when it happened again, except this time, the comp crashed and restarted. When it got to the point where i log in, my monitor did a weird double screen, and the comp crashed and restarted, and I have not been able to boot the computer since. I called HP Tech Support, and they are total idiots, (the tried to convince me that i needed to buy a media drive and that it would fix my computer!) and I have no clue what to do from here. I really don't want to take it in to a comp repair place, as I have many important files that i don't need deleted/ gone through. Can anyone shed some light on my situation?

First things first -- if your comp crashes with something serious like that it's a really bad idea to just fire it right back up and go into a CPU-taxing video game. I'd strongly recommend you never do that again.

That being said, leave it off for about 5-10 hours, then fire it up. Don't touch anything whatsoever, just fire it up. If you have to log on to windows with a password, don't bother, just leave it there. No touchie the mouse, keyboard, etc. Bring a book/PSP/DS/TV in there, because this may be awhile. Wait for 20-30 minutes and see if it randomly restarts on it's own, or powers off on it's own. If it does, you have a bad power supply (which are easy to replace). If not, then try playing a game and see how far you can go with it and get back to us.

Well, based on what you told me, on the login screen, i waited about an hour and it did nothing, so I logged in, and after about 30-40 mins, my screen.... hm.... I'm not sure how to describe this.... it went, really fuzzy. It looked like the screen had been compressed into a 2x1200 line across the screen, and the rest of the screen was black with yellow lines going it down it, then it restarted.

It sounds like your video card/chip is dying. Do you have another video card you could put in to test it?

crazytieguy wrote:It sounds like your video card/chip is dying. Do you have another video card you could put in to test it?

Yup, thats what HP said too. I didn't want to go digging to find my old computer and grab the video card, so I just sent it in to HP since it was still under warranty.