error and freeze win 98

try connecting 380volt to the bitch

Are these dash actual characters or is it part of the screen i.e. like an overlay. When my card went the lines were an overlay and not actual characters

Does it at least start displaying that it is loading some drivers for the install [at the bottome of the screen] before it goes all double-dashy on yer ass?

YES

ok then I'm assuming it's finished loading the drivers and you get the weird screen after it displays
[starting windows] which loads just after those drivers.

It's at this point it's interigating the hard drive and looking if there is a windows installation.

If it completely freaks out at this point then you have 3 possible causes

1. Poke GFX card - the XP Vesa Standard drive freaks out when initializing the card - bad result - coz it's a poked card
2. Hard drive read error - The XP install system tries to locate windows and has a problem with some system files and freaks out
This aint such a bad thing, best thing to do in this scenario is to actually take the hard drive out and do a format on it, on
another machine.
3. Hard drive controller freak out - this is bad, that means the motherboard IDE controller chip died, there aint no commin back
from the dead. Unless you come back as a zombie, which aint so great either, if you've seen L4d or L4D2 .. . *sigh

i did try a new HDD, and it did exactly the same

but how much would changing the thermal paste on the GPU make any difference?

Could work, shot in the dark though.