error and freeze win 98

[baselineac]

try connecting 380volt to the bitch

[Paul]

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

[SlipperyDuck]

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?

[flycatchr]

YES

[SlipperyDuck]

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

[flycatchr]

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?

[Megageth]

Could work, shot in the dark though.