Power Surge Problem? video card shot?

[Magnum901]

I was recently playing some video games up here in Buffalo during our recent Snow Storm, the power cut out for me 6 times. My power back up broke about 6 months ago and never replaced it. Anyhoot, the next day, while playing a game, my screen developed these multiple boxes all over the screen. I got out of the game and I had vertical lines on my desktop. It's not my monitor, but here's the weird part: I changed my display from 32 bit color to 16 bit and the lines were reduced. Since Counter Strike isn't demanding, I've been still able to play this(barely) and when I changed the video setting from "Hardware" to "software" I got small dots all over the screen thus allowing me to almost play pretty good. However, my mouse would stop working occasionally and when I exited the game, it still wouldn't work and I'd have to reboot. Well, I changed mouse from USB to PS2 mouse and now I have fewer lines on my desktop and in the counter Strike? SO did the power surges have anything to do with this and did it do more than just mess up my video card?
Sys. Info.
Dell Dimesion 8300
Radeon 9800 Pro
750 megs.
My 3 year Dell warranty expired 5 days ago(go figure).

 

[PC eye]

Have you tried refreshing the video drivers since this began? It's possible some of those got a little dinged up with the back and forth power dropoffs. Any time you see a bad shutdown a run of the check disk utilty to fix drive errors is generally seen. You have a few Windows glitches to work out if it turns out that the card is undamaged.