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]>