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Hello everyone,
I'm don't have much knowledge of computers, so I hope my question doesn't sound stupid, but I need some advice.
The computer of my parents, (An Athlon 3400+ with an ATI 9600 XT) has been given some problems the last two weeks.
Around 7 days ago, my parents called me and told that something strange was happening with the image of their screen. Whenever they would click on something (Icon, file, e-mail) strange colored horizontal lines would appear on the screen. They had this problem for several days now and when they called me their whole screen consisted of colored lines, from time to time changing into colored blocks.
My parents are now on holiday, so I took their computer in my house to look at it. The first day I couldn't do anything, because the screen would blur and fill with blocks/lines within a minute after starting. Even the screen in Safe Mode became corrupted within a minute. Sometimes, the screen wouldn't even respond when I would open a program. At the end, the computer wouldn't even display an image.
However, from that day (5 days now), the computer has been working perfectly strangely enough. I even played some games on it (around the Doom 3/Half-life 2 time) and they all work without problems. (Of course, the 9600 is old but runs them fine on low resolutions, the computer/card hasn't run 3D games for years.) I've updated drivers and I used ATItool to scan for artifacts but as far as I could see it worked well.
My problem is, is there a big chance the 9600 card will die soon? If the symptoms indicate to that, I'll buy a new AGP card to put in the computer, so it's fixed before my parents get back. Or should I just leave things as it is and wait a while? The computer is mainly used for writing letters/e-mails and a bit of internetsurfing.
Thanks in advance for the reply and apologies for the long post.
I'm don't have much knowledge of computers, so I hope my question doesn't sound stupid, but I need some advice.
The computer of my parents, (An Athlon 3400+ with an ATI 9600 XT) has been given some problems the last two weeks.
Around 7 days ago, my parents called me and told that something strange was happening with the image of their screen. Whenever they would click on something (Icon, file, e-mail) strange colored horizontal lines would appear on the screen. They had this problem for several days now and when they called me their whole screen consisted of colored lines, from time to time changing into colored blocks.
My parents are now on holiday, so I took their computer in my house to look at it. The first day I couldn't do anything, because the screen would blur and fill with blocks/lines within a minute after starting. Even the screen in Safe Mode became corrupted within a minute. Sometimes, the screen wouldn't even respond when I would open a program. At the end, the computer wouldn't even display an image.
However, from that day (5 days now), the computer has been working perfectly strangely enough. I even played some games on it (around the Doom 3/Half-life 2 time) and they all work without problems. (Of course, the 9600 is old but runs them fine on low resolutions, the computer/card hasn't run 3D games for years.) I've updated drivers and I used ATItool to scan for artifacts but as far as I could see it worked well.
My problem is, is there a big chance the 9600 card will die soon? If the symptoms indicate to that, I'll buy a new AGP card to put in the computer, so it's fixed before my parents get back. Or should I just leave things as it is and wait a while? The computer is mainly used for writing letters/e-mails and a bit of internetsurfing.
Thanks in advance for the reply and apologies for the long post.