Graphics Card Problem?

[foreverembraced]

I've had my PC for about 4 months now with no problems...sorta.
I have a Nvidia Graphics card (I believe the 7200? one of the newest better models) as well as gforce motherboard. The monitor I use is an Apple 23" cinema display and 2gigs of Ram.

My Problem:
The only thing I basically use it for is playing World of Warcraft and it has run great with full settings, but I did notice about a month ago that sometimes during playing it would "lock up" for about 5 seconds then I would hear a "click" from in my PC then it would go back to normal play.
I also recently started getting small colored dots on my start-up screens, like around the windows logo and also rows of letters on the DOS screen are now pink. It seemed like this was getting worse as it went on (more dots would appear etc.)

Now the major problem:
I got home from work last night and went to wake up my PC and I couldn't open any programs, so I shut down and tried to restart but no matter what mode I tried starting in (safe etc.) it would auto-restart again at the windows loading screen. So I went ahead and re-installed windows, reinstalled my drivers, reinstalled WoW and now I'm able to load Windows fine but I am still getting the colored dots and letters upon start up. I also noticed these colored dots/patches now on my WoW loading screen and one time I even had a large bar of all sorts of colors (didn't look good) behind my character on my character select screen. I also can't stay logged into WoW for more than 10 seconds now as well, if that helps figure this out at all.

Is this a sign of a faulty graphics card? Is it just dusty and needs to be cleaned? My PC has a great cooling system, but maybe this is letting too much dust in from all the fans and vents? Please help this is very frustrating.

 

[Sambase]

Hi

Hello mate,

from the sound of it you may have a harddrive problem. The fact that it made a clicking sound made me come to that conclusion quickly. Also the fact that no programs will open tells me that this is probably not a graphics card problem.

Do you hear a clicking sound often? If you do, TURN YOUR PC OFF ASAP. The reason for this is that the read head of your HD may have been jolted. When this happens it slams up and down on the disks inside your HD and 'dents' it. Everytime your read head goes over this divet, it does the same again but will more than likely hit the disk somewhere else. This will slowly destroy your HD and reduce the chance of your retrieving your data.

If there is no clicking, try reinstalling your graphics adapter or even temporarily installing a different one. If all works fine after this then you know the fault is the graphics card. If not, use this troubleshooting method for your other hardware if you can.

Regards,

Sam.

N.B. This can be a lengthy process, so good luck.

 

[SYL\X/3K]

i agree wat Sambase said about the clicking sound because i had expierance with my seagate. but then it died on me & no files recovered so i tought my seagate a lesson with slege hammer

 

[Snapple]

Heh, i'm having that problem with my old Maxtor HD (occasional clicks) right now, good thing I gave that computer to my parents; they'll never see it coming.

 

[MurdaX]

Dude that is very cold man you should tell that there is a possibility that the hard drive is going to die so that they can make the necessary preparations to have their data saved and export to another one that works. Trust me it happened to me and I lost a lot of important data.