SablePsy

I'm cross-posting this after having posted it in the Windows XP support forum and then doing some more research in the interim hours that led me to believe it might be a video card problem. I've noted there that I've cross-posted and will update either/both as appropriate.
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Toshiba Portege M205-S810 tablet PC
XP Pro, Tablet edition, with SP1 & SP2
Pentium M, 1.5Ghz
NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200

I'm sure I'll end up giving not enough info in some areas and too much in others, but I'll try to be thorough! And though I feel like a total moron for how I've handled this so far, I'll also be honest. :P

Today is Tuesday. On Friday, I received a new power cord and battery that I bought directly from Toshiba, having used their service to choose which ones matched my system. My computer had been sitting dormant for a couple of months because my cord had shorted out (common, so I've learned), and my battery was worthless even before that so I had no power options. I powered up, which was coming back from standby - not a fresh boot, I reset my time and date, and everything seemed to be working fine. That day, I sent some mail, played a game or two, and had no problems. I did not visit any internet sites out of my norm, which is to say that I'm reasonably cautious, particularly since I knew I had updates to install for all of my antivirus, antispyware, etc.

I didn't realize that I hadn't rebooted until Saturday when I was playing a game. In the background, my husband had Firefox 1.x running at the Project Gutenburg(?sp) site with a 300kb file loaded to read. The system froze up, and when I tried to Windows button+D to get back to the desktop, from the top of the screen moving toward the bottom, the screen pixelated into wide black, white, and green stripes. This continued, with the pattern changing. I held in the power button and shut it down. That's when I realized that I hadn't had a fresh boot since powering up again. I thought I'd probably had a virtual memory issue since I'd run some graphics-intensive games, even though I'd had that problem before without seeing an error like this before.

The computer didn't restart with the power button. The fan ran, the light showed that the power was on, but the screen stayed black like it was off. I pushed the power button back off and left it alone for a while (30 minutes maybe?) and then tried again. It came back up with an option to start in safe mode or return to the most recent working configuration. I chose the most recent good configuration, and again, things seemed fine. I went ahead and installed my Microsoft updates, rebooted again just fine, and then closed it up to hibernate.

The next day, he went back to the same website, and a short while later, playing the same game, I had the same freeze up, screen pixeling and rolling, and eventually shut down with the power button again (The game was from BigFish Games, which is supposed to be guaranteed virus/spyware-free. I had not played it on this computer before but had played on another computer without a problem.).

Again, the computer would not come up, but this time, it took even longer. I ended up trying it yesterday in the same way with the same findings - black screen, green power light, fan running, nothing else. I left it alone for the rest of the night until just now.

On pressing the power button, it started to load as normal, but gave the BSOD after the Windows XP Pro loading screen. I didn't get the error :( except that it said STOP and a bunch of 0's (not like me to write it down - sorry!), and said there was a dump created. No driver was referenced though.

On rebooting from the BSOD, I got this, which finally freaked me out:

Please celect the o'ebading sisdem do sdabt*

Micbocoft Windogs X@ @rofescional

Uce the u' and dogn abrow keyc do move dhe highlighd do youb choice.
Pbecs ENTER to chooce.

For tboeblechooding and advanced ctardu' opdionc fob Gindowc, pbecs F(.


...and THAT I'm not touching, so it's still sitting at that point. Could this really be just a video card problem? (just, ha) Thank you!

SablePsy

Anyone? Just hoping :)