Well the good news is that the new graphics card has shown up, I plugged it in and now the bios etc are all displaying fine, but now I have another problem. Something obviously went wrong when I tried the system restore yesterday, because now whether I start in safe mode or start normally, I'm getting a blank screen with a mouse pointer on it, but nothing else. GAh. I'm prepared to reinstall Vista on my machine if that's what it takes, but when I have the cd-room in my machine it doesn't make any difference, and I've tried telling my motherboard to boot from the cd-rom and not the hard disk, but it still doesn't work. I've got the screen saver come up at least. Any more ideas?

It looks like the gfx card in my old pc is so ancient that it won't even fit in my PC, so I've ordered a cheap new one. Hope it works

When I start windows in safe mode, I just get the black screen with a load of blue lines all over it, as in one of the photos. If I leave it for a while, the screen saver appears. Yes I guess based on that it can display lower resolutions, up to a point, albeit with stuff all over the screen.

Maybe shedding a bit more light on this, when I tried to get to windows again but left it for ages this time, eventually my windows screensaver appeared instead of the blank screen. To me this suggests that my gfx card for some reason isn't able to display the normal windows screen, even though it's there, if that makes sense

ok I managed to upload the photos, hopefully...

have a look

http://s459.photobucket.com/albums/qq314/gamespotjk/

I was hoping I'd be able to remove the graphics card from the equation by trying some sort of motherboard based graphics, but I don't think that's possible as the only way to plug my monitor into the PC is via the graphics card.

Perhaps I should be more accurate here, I guess they are not really random characters, they are pretty much in the same place every time, during the bios screen I have vertical lines down the screen, then in windows (when I was able to see it, why has that gone??) there were horizontal blue lines. Annoyingly putting photos up probably isn't possible since I'm typing this out on an ancient iBook and I've tried connecting my camera phone for pictures and it doesn't seem possible.

I thought about some sort of firmware thing, but as you can probably tell, I don't know much about these things, and haven't a clue how to flash bios etc, or even what that means... I can tell you I'm using a Striker Extreme motherboard at least... Doesn't flashing motherboards require a disk in a floppy drive, which I don't have...

I have gone into the bios set up screen and tried to look for any obvious error messages, but nothing is coming up.

I have a reasonable PC and use a Geforce 8800GTX graphics card. I was playing wow last night and the screen froze and a load of random blue lines appeared all over the place. Shut the machine down and there are random characters all over the bios screens during start up, and I can only start Vista in safe mode, or I get a blue screen saying it's unable to restart the graphics driver. Once I get to Vista via safe mode, there are the same blue lines horizontaly all over the screen.

So my first assumption is that it's the graphics card that has an issue, however would the bios screen be affected by this though, I thought stuff in the bios was from the motherboard rather than the gfx card?

anyway, I've tried rolling back the drivers with no success, checked all my connections etc. Really I can't think of any changes that I've made to the machine that might have caused this. I'm not over-clocking the card. I have tried doing a system restore, however now when I start up my machine, the random characters are still all over the bios and now I can't even get to windows in safe mode, I just get a blank screen, which makes me think I've now got a second problem!

Anyway any help would be appreciated. I suspect the best thing to do is get hold of another graphics card, put it in and see if that works any better, although I'm still annoyed that now windows itself seems not to be working either. I certainly won't bother buying another fancy graphics card for this, what's cheap and cheerful and does the job?

thanks

I'm sure this is a question that has been asked many times, but since I'm annoyed I'm asking again: what's the point of a feedback system that does not have any impact on the player receiving negative, and also does not mean you won't get put with that person in another online game, several times?

Playing GTA races today, the same guy kept parking up, driving the wrong way, ramming etc, all the usual disruptive stuf which, to a point, I accept as part of the game, I know we're not playing Forza here. But if I give him negative feedback, which I did since he thwarted my chances of winning a race, I don't expect to get put with him another three times in the next three races that I do, especially in a game as popular as GTA4 where there must be loads of races on at the same time. OK, I could have just left those races to avoid him and go to others, but I thought I might just avoid him or he may start to race sensibly, but no, he just carried on.

Clearly my leaving negative feedback has no affect on him, and does not preclude me from being teamed with him again. Another thing, whenever I leave negative feedback against even the most offensive, unfair or whatever players, they always have five star ratings anyway, which suggests to me that nobody is really bothering to leave these people negative feedback, or that it takes a lot of negative before somebody loses half a star off their reputation.

If one bit of negative feedback knocked off half a star or something, then people may notice that people aren't happy with them and start to do something about it, although I accept that this might be open to abuse.

OK, I could file a complaint, but sometimes these aren't the types of offences that you can complain about.

Any thoughts on this? I just hate to have this system but then it's a complete waste of time.

Ha! Well the main problem seems to have been that you can't seem to put a space in your name, as far as I can tell! I eventually got a perfectly reasonable ID as long as there were no spaces in it. Fair enough, this is different to the 360 that I'm used to, it just would have been nice if it said that in the first place!

There weren't any offensive words, and really when I'm putting in things like 3982hpeiohf9weyr or whatever and still getting rejected then something's up.