All week I’ve been fighting with my computer. It was hanging on the startup. It would get through most of the startup routine, and then just hang. The hourglass would stop spinning, an the whole system would just freeze. My thinking was that a RAM card was getting ready to fry.

Lately, my monitor has been blinking at odd intervals. I chalked it up to the fact that I bought it in 1997 and it was refurbished at that time; I figured it was finally dying.

This morning, I went into safe mode to try to diagnose the problem, which I did. After two minutes, the screen condensed to half the size, and the graphics went all funny. I tried restarting, but my motherboard beeped uncontrollably due to a bad card. It wasn’t the RAM card. It wasn’t my monitor that was bad. It was the video card.

So now I have a really old VGA card that has only 16-bit color and a 640 x 480 pixel screen plugged into my computer. It’s not very good for pretty much anything everything. Thankfully, I have a connect to get a better one cheap-cheap.

It just goes to show you that with computers, the apparent solution isn’t always the correct solution, and a couple of guesses for diagnoses, while wrong, can be taken together to point to the real problem.