Is my computer fried (pics)???

[Guest]

I was flying w/ flight simulator 2002 and suddenly my computer (see specs below) froze up with an image of takeoff stuck on the screen. I rebooted and now this is what I get.....the first image is of the inital post screen, even the ascii characters look corrupt. The second image is the second page of the post after it detects the hardrive etc. However, notice that there are correctly displayed (althought scrambled) ascii characters, some of which change about 1 per seconds, like a clock. The third page is the windows XP loading screen, everything here is scrambled, however, at the bottom the image moves like it does when the blue bar moves to the right while loading WinXP, so it is trying to load the OS. The computer then locks up on this screen and the hardrive quits. I assumed the videocard was the problem initially, so I swapped it out with my other computer that is working okay, but I get the exact same problem....so it is not the videocard. After that, I was thinking that maybe the Asus A7N8X Deluxe (Rev 1.04) motherboard got zapped....that is what I am thinking now. We were having some thunderstorms maybe about 10-15 miles away, and I did notice some power surges that evening, even though when this occurred there did not seem to be any power hits.Anyone got a clue???Thanks,Patrick Cary, NCAsus A7N8X Deluxe (Rev. 1.04)AMD XP2800 Barton w/ Volcano 9 HSFOnboard Sound, Onboard Nvidia NICDisabled Serial Port, Onboard 3COM NIC, & SATAAll PCI slots open2X 512 Corsair XMS3500C2 Memory (1 GB Total)ATI 9700 ProMaxtor DM +9 80GB HD LG 48X 24X 48X CD Burner & DVD ROM WinXP Pro SP1Nothing Overclocked!

[Guest dfoulk]

Patrick,Take 2 aspirins and check it in the morning.It doesn't look good. I have never seen anything like that. I think your idea about the MB would be a good thing to check, but you might start out checking your HD to see if it will boot if you plug it into your other computer. Kind of a pain, but you will have to narrow it down a part at a time. Den

[Guest tgabriel]

Damage from surges does not necessarily become evident at the same time they happen and it very well could be the mobo. Also, you might have bad video driver. The card might be ok in another machine but the driver which the computer uses to talk to the device might be scrambulated because of a surge. Try booting into safe mode and see what happens. This mode uses the default windoze vga video drivers. If you have a picture but a very elementary picture, it is the drivers to your card and you will have to reinstall them. If you have the same stuff as the pics you posted then it probably is the mobo. Not a big deal to swap out if that really is the problem.

[Guest John_Cillis]

The driver can't be it if the display is bonkers in the post screen. Before giving up, I'd consider trying another monitor as well. Second test would be pulling all cards except the vid card, in case one card such as a LAN or modem card was fried.As a last resort, many motherboards have a reset jumper which will clear trashed BIOS settings. That may be enough to knock the MB back to its senses...