Hi all, I have the following problems and am getting mixed response from some of my buddies. Sometimes when I am in windows my screen will flicker, I originally thought of the following possibilities. 1/ Overheating of display card (I did not overclock anything but I did not clean the inside for years so I thought it must be a dead fan) 2/ Too high the refresh frequency (I am using 85Hz and it is supported but I am thinking along the line of 1/) I cleaned the fan and everything seems fine for a while. The problem comes and go sometimes. Lately it is getting more frequent. There comes time when I cannot even go into windows, I was left with the blue screen (bad poolcaller I think). One of my friend said (quite rightly) that my low end display card shouldn't be overheat even if no fan and he suspects 3/ Motherboard dying (one of my ram slot were acting crazy a few months ago) because of bursting capacitor (though I check and smell nothing) 4/ Faulty ram My other friend thinks it is a driver issues and a reinstall will probably work. I just wish to know what you guys think. I don't really want to buy a new motherboard + display card if it doesn't help, nor a total reinstall seems tempting :)

Instead of a complete re-install,have you tried a repair installation?Do you have system restore so you can go back to a time when you didn't have the problems?http://www.memtest86.com/>Have you ran memtest?

Yea I guess I have to run memtest. I dare not to repair, I once ran a repair and it screw up so bad that I have to completely reinstall. Thanks for reminding me of the ram test though

Try a different monitor. If the monitor is flickering, it's probably the monitor, the video card or the driver. Sorry, I do not check for private messages

I don't think it is the monitor, first of all, the same monitor + motherboard + display card combo been there for around 2 years and no such error b4, secondly, I don't think monitor failure will prevent me from getting into windows (with the blue screen of death). Any ideas? BTW, I ran memtest briefly yesterday for around an hour and no error was found, I will run it longer today but I guess that eliminate the ram as culprit.

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Feb/bch20030207018535.htm>This is a good read.You may try using just 1 ram slot at a time to see if it will work that way.>http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=195

Thanks, the 2nd article seems very similar to my case, as in the article, I am using a socket A motherboard. Will read and see, thanks again