Yellow lines across screen, now blank screen and fuzzy BIOS- boots into windows though!

hi

i have a serious problem.

before i check my warranty ect i just want to see if this is a fixable problem.

i was on my inspiron 9400 playing cod4 with a 7900gs card and i started getting bright yellows and greens on textures and objects untill the game crashed.

then within XP there were yellow horizontal lines but i could still use the laptop. then i tried to access the nvidia control panel and then the laptop started frezes untill i held down the power button.

now when i start up i have fuzzy bios and i can see the fuzzy loading screen of XP and dual booting vista but then the screen goes blank even though im in windows.

this all leads to a hardware fault- probably the graphics card as windows works but does not display. i have not dropped it.

i did however install a driver from tweakedrus or something like that to get gears of war working. but this was working for 2 weeks beforehand so its unlikely its a driver issue.

just wanted to see what you guys thought.

cheers

 

hve u tried restoring to factory setings i.e format to factory default???

 

hi
thanks for the response.

the fact that it boots into windows surely means that there is nothing wrong with windows, rite?
i suppose it could be the driver but because i cant actually access windows then that is a slight problem.

i havnt done that and i would not like to lose all my data, hopefully thats a last resort.

cheers

 

I don't think it's a driver problem if the screen is fuzzy in the BIOS too.
If you want to try changing the driver, boot into safe mode. Safe mode only loads standard drivers -- won't load any drivers you installed yourself.

 

hi
ill test that and see what happens but i highly doubt it is a driver problem like you said.

 

Try using an external monitor, check if its also appearing there. If it is, then the LCD is not the problem. Most likely the GPU itself.

Permanent graphical issues is a sign of overheated gpu memory

 

thanks mate.

i just booted into safe mode and now windows sort of works.


here is a pic



it has those strange yellow diagonal lines again going across the screen.

it also says do you want windows to restore itself or boot into safe mode....

cheers

edit=

ok, i went into safe mode and tried to install dells driver and rebooted and still fuzzy bios.

so im gonna see if restoring it like it shows in the pic works.

 

If you're seeing the problem in safe mode like that, the problem isn't the drivers.
Did you try an external monitor? I'm guessing it will look the same way.
It looks like the video card is damaged (like flipfire said).

 

hi
yep, now its just a process of backing up in safe mode untill it gets fixed.
anyone got any spare 7900gs cards lying around?
cheers