So, what part of my PC is fucked?

[Daimen-G]

After installing Prototype a couple days ago and playing it for a while, I got a hard crash. My PC completely locked up, though the game's music was still playing. After a few moments, blue dots began to cover the screen. I shut down my PC manually and rebooted it, and it locked up again on launch, with the same blue dots. After booting in safe mode and updating my graphics card's drivers, I got it to work normally until I tried to play Team Fortress 2 to see if it would work. For a while, it did, but then I got the same hard crash. I used to be able run Windows normally after a lot of mucking around, but the last major crash I got seems to have permanently prevented access to anything but safe mode.

Now, even after several system restores, I cannot use my PC outside of safe mode. Sometimes, before Windows even loads, the display is garbled and displays a lot of corrupted characters. At one point, loading into safe mode produced a wall of "pbhthhtthh" while booting, which probably would have been funny if it wouldn't have been the result of some part of my PC being screwed. If I load normally, I don't even make it to my desktop. There's just a wall of black and white bars, with blue dots. My computer also emits a loud buzzing sound every so often, which I think is the hard drive. Blue and yellow bars also cover the screen in safe mode, but I can still use basic functions like the internet.

For what it's worth, Steam also had an aneurysm after the crash and I had to reinstall it. This is also the first time I've had any major issue with this PC after about two years of using it.

I'm running Windows XP, my Graphics card is a Geforce 8800 GTX, and my processor is an x86 Intel Core 2 6600.

[Furtwangler]

do you have onboard video? try that if you can, I think it's definetley vid card related. take the case off and see if the buzzing is coming from that or your hard drive because it could be both.

[Olo401]

Does your machine boot to BIOS and do the same kind of graphical nonsense?

[Bartylby]

dumb question: was this copy of prototype legit or bootleg?

[Daimen-G]

It was a legit copy of Prototype off Steam.

Does your machine boot to BIOS and do the same kind of graphical nonsense?

Yeah. It's full of bad characters maybe half of the time I try to boot it up.

Ed: Seemingly by chance, Windows just booted up properly. The hard drive screeching stopped. I don't want to risk running a game though :<

[xopher]

If the problems are occurring after the BIOS screens, then you need to format your hard drive and reinstall windows. If the problem still persists, I would run diagnostics on your hard drive and graphics card.

But from what you have said, it sounds like it's during the BIOS which rules out the hard drive.

At this point it could be the motherboard, memory, or graphics card or even the power supply pushing the wrong voltage.

You will need to replace each component one at a time to see which one causes the problems to cease.

[Daimen-G]

Christ I hope it's not something that complicated. I am not good with computers I haven't had any errors since yesterday and I've restarted my computer several times while reinstalling a bunch of programs that were somehow effected (Steam and Ad-Aware). I still haven't tried to run a game.

Thanks for the help, though. I'm probably going to take my PC to a friend's place to work on it next week and I'll keep what you guys have said in mind.

[xopher]

To me it sounds like the problems are stemming from your graphics card since they seem to appear when you run 3-D games.

[Mafai]

I had an issue with bad characters due to RAM a bit ago. Try running memtest86 to test your memory.