On 3/8/2010 3:43 AM, Koenraad Lelong wrote:
Hi,
Last weekend I experienced problems with my home desktop. It locked up hard. When I power-cycled I remarked that some letters of the BIOS boot-messages were distorted. If I had these, the PC could boot but it couldn't go into graphics mode. Character-mode seemed fine. Now and then it worked for a while. I suspected the video-card. I took it out, and this morning I put it in a PC here at work. Now it seems to work OK ! It's running a few hours now without problem. I ran memtest for several hours with zero errors but the screen was distorted. With this I mean : the characters are there and readable but there were a high number of small vertical lines, few tens of pixels long, 1 pixel wide (I guess these numbers). The video-card is an NVidia GeForce 8500 GT, a PCIexpress 16x board. Next thing is the power-supply I'm going to investigate. Before it locked up, it had good voltages though. Anything else ? Thanks for hints. If it matters, the machine runs suse 10.2, but OS 11.2 is also installed and has the same problems.
This used to be fairly common occurrence years ago when vid cards were populated with plug in memory chips. Usually you could simply squeeze each chip tightly into its socket. Unless you have some socketed memory its unlikely to be your problem. You could have a clock issue on the card. But your post above seems to suggest it works fine in a different machine. (You said it did, but then the next sentence said it didn't, so which is it). Also check the motherboard for bulging/leaking Capacitors. I've seen this manifest itself in wierd ways as well, as often these are uses in filter circuits and when they short out unwanted frequencies seep into other circuits, causing havoc. If you find them, your mobo is toast. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org