Ok, according to dell i have a "fried" radeon 9700 pro 128 mb ram vid card, they say they been getting a lot of these scenarios lately, so I figure ok, Ill have onsite support come out and stick a new one in for me. Well, to make sure it was the vid card, i installed an old game (diablo 2) that requires some vid ram to function normally, now right now i have yellow lines running through my screen vertically, defnitely corrupt vid card, but after i played the game and yes it was whacked completely proving dell's little geniuses right, i figure, ok, 5 days and ill be back in business, hour later, i come back and reboot since the games an oldy and wants me to reboot upon installation, cpus been on for that hour, so i reboot, log on, games gone, desktop icon is gone, still in programs, but whenever i run it, well the first time it gave me an error message cannot find file in specified location yadayadayada, but now when i try to run, it just blanks out, like it doesnt exist, is this from and already bad vid card overheating? I also recently replaced a 266 MHZ 512 ddr stick with a 333MHZ stick and that's when problems started, dell guy says thats usually when it happens but its not the rams fault its the card's. So i figure whatever. but i look at the instruction for installing the ram stick (which i missed one step in) after unplugging the whole thing. GROUND IT BY PRESSING THE POWER BUTTN AGAIN. IS THIS STEP IMPORTANT? I missed it so uhh my bad or the card's? Help please!!!

It sounds to me like the motherboard is bad. My Dell had some pretty odd symptoms as the MB started to die. Run the Dell diagnostic CD and see what you get. If it finds errors in several different devices then I would bet the board is all done. Dell's are famously hard on motherboards. Jimi_l