ok iv been trying for months now to get my Girlfriends computer a 2800+ ADM Sempron running smothly i wont play games without frezzing every 10 seconds and it flashes strange shaps in games boxes and lines im running a NVIDIA Geforce 4 TI 4200 AGP 8x on a Gigabyte main board k8 Triton GA-k8vm800m with 1 gig of ram i cant seem to get it to do anything right and its realy anoying me can anyone help here?

Sounds pretty much like overheating problems. Check if the FAN + heatsink is properly affixed on top of the CPU. In any case, the ideal thing to do would be to get some silica gel (the heatsink contact paste) and sandwich a thick layer between the heatsink and the chip surface and then give it a shot..

THIN as possable

the purpose of that gell is to fill micro scratches on the metal that are invisible to the naked eye....

In a perfect world, there should be only the gell inside the miscro scraches.. and as close to possable metal to metal contact on the surface

a pea sized blob buffed onto each surface with your finger inside a sandwich bag works well.

Read the instruction manual.



Note: first time me and M^e disagreed on somthing... take a photo

This is more a graphic card problem, not a cpu problem, and even more a problem with the graphicsmemory. I suppose these strange shapes are rectangulare and with their tops in the center of the screen?

I'd agree that it sounds like over heating, I've seen similar happen a few times when I put a bigger GPU in my comp and had poor cooling even BEFORE beefing up the heat amounts made by the GPU (not to say that GPU is whats being affected by the heat, just that it sounds like an over heating issue overall). If just the GPU was freaking out the comp probably wouldn't freeze so much as have constant graphical vomitings.

I'd say grab one of those programs like motherboard monitor and see what temps your comp is running at, then google to see what the normal temps are for that model and see if anyone else had the same problem. If thats a stock notebook I'd bet other people experienced whatever is happening to you.

Im putting my money on the graphics card.
When it starts to add funky color, lines and blocks to your screen.. thats the video card on its way out.

Want to push the card to see if it really is that? Run 3dmark05

Ok if you have put money on this then you are about to find out.......

it was the Graphics card... I initially thought that it was the BIOS have output problems so I updated the BIOS to see if that would help... nope nothing there so I got annoyed and gave up for the night. in the morning I tried the heat sink thing that was mention here and still same problem... having said that though my girl friends compy is running allot cooler now and quieter to, anyway I still had the same issue, so I thought maybe the Graphics is to new and advanced for the chip set and CPU so I tried the onboard video card and that worked fine.... well ok it was slow and crap graphics but it worked no frizzing and no strange shapes... witch then led me to put... I don’t want to say it... my NVIDIA MX 440SE into the system... And strange enough its working great now iv not had any issues with it.

So my conclusion is that if you get a Sempron 754 socket 2800+ use an older video card with it.

Thanks for the help guys and girls

I was also about to suggest using the latest Windows XP because there has been report that playing certain games on earlier Windows version will hang the systems on new cards like my GeForce 6600.

xboxrulz

i dont think that windows was the issue becuse i used that same card in my computer b4 i upgraded it, to a new i didnt have any problems with it mind you tho i had a better CPU and mobo so thats why i think that XP didnt have anything to do with it, realy i think its the CPU, it cant support the better cards its just not preformace stable its good for everything else except the games

alls well that ends well tho, i got it fixed at a samll losst to preformance, i dont have to use the computer and my girl friend doesnt notice the difrance

I had the same problem with an ATI Radeon 9250 on my Compaq 6016. Both are really old but i seriously don't know which is older. Turns out the compaq is older .

What I'm still wondering though, is why the graphics card worked for me for about 2 months before it started spazzing and keep having to reset itself. Now i can't even login using the default login screen of Windows XP. The little display pics of each user sorts of jumps and the computer hangs, and i have to restart it manually. Now I'm just using my superbly lame nVIDIA Geforce 2 which uses the shared memory. Impossible to play any form of true 3D games. (Well..it IS possible, except your eyes will literally rip out of its sockets at the very sight of the lag )