Power Surge Problem?

M

Magnum901

New Member
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). :(
 
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There is a cheap generic surge protector at the outlet. I've been experiencing this for 3 days now.
I've contacted Dell Tech support and he was guessing it was the Video card. I wasn't comfortable with his answer given his lack of confidence. Basically, could a computer's hardware get damaged just by unplugging several times without a boot down.? Or do video cards just go after the warranty expires? ( the was a rhetorical question, i think)
 
Thanks for your help thus far. I was wonder if my motherboard has an intergrated video. How would I do this or determine if I got intergrated video? I did start it in safe mode and it did have lines, just one half my screen. I did reload the drivers with the help of the Dell tech.
 
If you plug your monitor in near all the other plugs (mouse, keyboard, USB, printer, etc.) then it's integrated with the motherboard. If you plug it into another plug at the bottom of the case, then your plugging it into a graphics card. You shouldp probably get one anyway if you into gaming.
 
There is only one place to plug my monitor into, hence my system probably doesn't have integrated graphics. I guess what is really throwing my for a loop is that it seems my video card went and then my mouse went. Mind you, I switched from a USB mouse to a PS2 mouse and everything is fine. Is all this possible from coincidence or power surges? or was my motherboard trashed from the power outages or did the power outages have nothing to do with this and some software got corrupted?
 
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