HELP!! Smiley faces after BIOS Startup!! Then Windows problems!

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rocket1406

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I am at college but my brother's home PC has problems. It starts up normal through my BIOS ... Abit/Athlon logos.

Then it goes to the screen asking if I want to start Windows in Safe Mode or Normal with a Timer.

In every single blank space there is a Smiley Face. Some are blue some are white, mostly in alternations of 4. And some of the letters changed from white to blue.

And then after the 15 seconds pass by, it goes to the Windows XP start screen (black with blue bar)... it does that but there are random green lines across the screen. And then my monitor says Check source and Connection after a couple of seconds. After about 7 minutes, I can hear the Windows starting sounds but can't see it.

I have an AMD Athlon X2 4200+, 200 GB Maxtor HD, 7800 GTX, 1 GB Ram

Thanks very much. I want to know if there is a way to fix it (without losing my HD) and if it sounds like a worm/virus vs. a hardware failure.
 
Definitely sound like some sort of spyware/malware infection to me. I'm no expert on what to do when things like that happen. The only thing I can tell you to do is reinstall windows, which is probably not the only option so don't jump the gun on it, Unless you don't mind setting everything back up again. Sounds like an odd problem though, Never heard of anything like that happening before.
 
Yeah. I'm leaning towards either Hard drive virus/worm, or a Video Card failure. I just don't know how to find out which first (I don't want to reformat and lose everything if it's not my hard drive).

I don't have installation knowledge, so anything I do I have to pay someone to do for me.
 
Well it doesn't sound video related in anyway. I really doubt your 7800 would start randomly producing smiley icons. Don't pay someone to install windows again for you. It practicially does it for you, you just have minimal clicking and some filling in the blanks to do.
 
Maybe it is the card then, Weird. Never heard of anything like that happening, See if you can test the card out in another machine first.
 
Yeah, I just cleared the hard drive, and it still has some smileys even in the Windows Install software. Has to be the video card memory.
 
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