M720 US3 - Hangs after POST, before IRQ check - XP Pro 32

[cookie365]

Had an odd problem this afternoon.

The first time I restared after installing two inoccuous apps (Womble MPEG DVD Wizard & Abbyy Finereader) my PC would hang between the POST and the part where it lists SMART drives and IRQ settings.

There was just a blinking cursor at top left.

It wasn't memory - a memtest confirmed that, and SuperFdisk found nothing wrong with the drive.

I could boot from CD OK, just not into XP.

Assuming it was an MBR or partition problem I used a live Acronis CD to restore the drive back to yesterday's backup. And that seemed to solve the problem. Reinstalling those apps seemed to bring it back. Restoring again seemed to solve it again.

I say 'seemed' because I only restarted one or two times - I didn't want to tempt fate

I now have XP back up, at least for now.

As far as I can see the RAM is fine, the drives are fine, the CPU (phenom 550) is fine, nothing overclocked or over volted.

The only 2 PCI cards I have are the gfx which is currently drawing windows on the screen, and a DVB TV tuner card, which is currently showing X Factor on my PC screen.

So odd as it sounds, it really does look like one of these apps has caused the problem.

 

 Unless it's a mobo issue but I can't for the life of me see what that might be; F5 BIOS has been working fine so far, haven't been into the CMOS settings.

Anyone else seen anything like this on the same or similar mobo?

Thanks 

[cookie365]

Oh, hold on, all is not well

The screen started flashing black horizontally and the playback of the TV card got jerky.

Thought it was the house power supply but this laptop I'm typing on wasn't affected. The taskbar and then the back of the start menu turned black and everything froze up.

 

I've turned off the PC and it's midnight so I'll leave it turned off until tomorrow.

So could it be:

1. mobo
2. gfx (Asus 9400GT, only about a month old)
3. TV card (hauppauge 1100, a couple of years old, no problems before)
4. power supply (Asus 450 watts, should be more than enough, a couple of years old but only used for about 8 weeks)

??

I hate computers .. 

[oggmonster]

Can you try your graphics card in another machine? Black horizontal/flashing lines often indicate a memory or graphics issue.