As you have likely reasoned, this sounds like your video card is 
overheating. You can try re-cleaning the video card fan using "canned 
air" or, if possible, replace the fan. I do not think it is a HD issue 
unless you have some other reason to question it.

Hopefully, the video card itself is still OK.

Tom

Optonline wrote:
> My desktop has a problem that is shutting it down as far as video is concerned.  This is a home build (2003) on an ASUS P4P800 board with a Radeon 9500 Pro video card.  It appeared to be functioning fine yesterday.  Today it started up fine but after sitting for about 1/2 an hour wouldn't restart. I first thought it was just the usual sleep mode, but the mouse was not showing any light and moving the mouse didn't wake anything up.  Neither did touching the keyboard.  I hit restart and it restarted, gave me an error message about the ATI board overclocking failing (I don't overclock anything), restarted and went to Windows, filled the desktop icons and than lost the monitor after about 2 minutes.  The monitor said it wasn't getting a signal.  I restarted again with a similar result.  Decided to open up the box, found it needed a cleaning of all the vents etc. which I did including the CPU heat sink.  When I restarted again I noticed the ATI fan wasn't working, I gave it a push and it ran but not very fast.
>
> My questions:
> 1. Can this be a video card failure of some sort?  It is booting and loading Windows, it just won't stay on.  It doesn't turn itself off just seems to kill the video so I can't tell if the OS is still functioning.
>
> 2.  Could there be a HD failure?  If so how can I test for that?
>
> I don't have a spare video card but will see if I can borrow one tomorrow or buy a cheap one.
>
> Thanks,
> Bob Warasila
>         
>   

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