Because I do a great deal of state-of-the-art work, I must work on some
projects at home as well as at work...Just thought I'd mention that n
case someone is worried about a government worker posting a home
computer question!  :)

Here's the problem.  A few weeks back my 2-year-old Gateway 486 DX (2
gig hard drive, running WIn95) PC began strange behavior.  Black stripes
appeared from the top to the bottom of the screen and windows would make
copies of themselves, superimposed.  If you tried to move an icon, it
would make a cutout of itself instead of actually moving, leaving a
black hole where the icon was, and making ghost images of itself.  All
of this obliterated the screen so that it was impossible to read
(between black bars, yet!)

When I tried shutting down and rebooting, the monitor would flash gray
and white, with gray and white stripes.  If I left it off for a while,
it would come back to the first scenario and start all over, and so on.

I called Tech Support at Gateway.  They said the video card must be
loose and that I should try reseating it.  I did, and got the gray
screen again except it momentarily switched to light blue as if trying
to show the Windows screen.  Then it went back to gray and white
stripes.  You could see the hard drive chunking away, and it tries to
boot, but you can't see anything.

They said to try a different slot.  I tried that and got nothing but a
black screen.  The machine still tries to boot but you can't see
anything.  The monitor (which has a chip of its own) gives a message
that there's no input.  I've reseated the card several (hundred!!)
times.  No change.  They sent a new video card (which looked damaged!!).
No change.  Now they're thinking it's a motherboard, but since they
charge you for replacement parts and then give you a repate, I would
rather think about how to fix it myself than try to get any more parts
from them for a while.

Any ideas?  (I can't remember the specs on the video card...STB...)  Any
chance of replacing it with an off-the-shelf card?   Do you really think
I've got to change the entire blankety-blank motherboard now?!  SIGH.
HELP!  :(

                         PCBUILD's List Owner's:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                        Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>