venting

For those who read my posts purely for the warfare, religion or politics, stop reading now. This is a personal post. I'm terribly sorry. There is, however, nothing more prominent on my mind than what has been troubling me this afternoon.

It all started when I let my nephew play Dawn of War Dark Crusade on my laptop. He finished his homework and I was busy reading Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov anyway so it seemed like a reasonable request.
 Suddenly, during Dark Crusade, the unthinkable happened. It crashed in a vehement, violent display of vibrant colours.




At first I thought it was just the game crashing my system because of some random error which probably would only occur once every million uses. So I rebooted.

And I felt a sickening twisting deep in my gut as I saw 7 white columns of horizontal lines appear as my computer posted, then they disappeared. Windows started to boot but then crashed with a blue screen, implying that "nvlddmkm.sys" was to blame. So it seemed as if there was either a problem with the graphics card or driver. Funny that, seeing in all my years of having this desktop with that particular driver and graphics card I have never had this problem.

So I rebooted in safe mode (in safe mode the display drivers are disabled) which worked and then proceeded to update my drivers. The white columns of lines were still present. My pessimism returned with fervor.
 Then windows crashed during start up. My pessimism was realism in disguise.

So it seems my old nvidia 8800 GTS has died.... Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't see what else might be causing this problem. Any techies out there, feel free to give some advice...

In the meantime, Farewelll Graphics Card. I will miss you...