Well, to make a long story shorter..
Whent to join TG#1 to kill some stress but it was full, supper was soon so I switched to TG#3 instead and went to join Duke for a round.
Before the round started I had to getup and do some thing and ma moved my chair out so she could get to the printer so I had to wait. By the time I got to sit back down my computer had already had the monitor blip and the PC restart -- from running SWAT4:TSS to showing the BIOS start screen... if there was any error message before that I didn't get a chance to see it.
On each restart that followed the monitor was all funky and kept blipping on and off as if the signal wasn't working.
Instantly my brains thinking monitor, monitor cable, graphics card, fans, and motherboard for possible problems. Hooked up the monitor I got from the Library for a few bucks, same effect. Opened the case, blew the crap out of it with a can of air. Yanked all of the PCI family cards out, Audigy 4, TV Tuner, GeForce 6200 e.t.c and gave them a go. Cut my finger trying to get the graphics card out of it's PCI-Ex16 slot, freaking plastic lever was to buried to see which way it angled.
Unscrewed the main (looked 90mm) fan from the case but the power connector was to short to pull it clean for cleaning... Couldn't get that unplugged so I pulled out the (E)IDE cable connecting the DVD-ROM's and one of the 512MB RAM DIMMs and still couldn't get the flib'n thing out.. So I ended up cleaning it with a paper towel half over the PSU, half over the mother board :\ Needless to say I didn't even want to mess with the issue of getting to the CPU.
Managed to get that screwed back in and then I had to pull the main power off the motherboard to get the RAM slot back in (the slots are right under the worst tangle of power cabling!). The inside of the PC was dusty but not that bad, most of it was just on the fan blades and the front side vents (veeerrrryyyy bad) but still cleaner then Ma's Dell and that things been running forever without a cleaning, like once in 7+ years.
Booted her back up and still no luck although the main fan was running a heck of a lot better the temp was still normalD. I noticed though that my motherboard had a port for a monitor on it with a cover. I remember there was a note taped on it when I first set up the computer < 2 years ago.
Interestingly while the monitor was displaying screwy when plugged intot he Geforce 6200, maybe even some kind of pixel array during the computers startup. It was perfectly fine when in the BIOS setup, maybe because it would have to be used at a really low level dunno. Set the BIOS Video configuration from AUTO to Integrated, restarted and changed ports.
Using the onboard 128MB Intel GMA it works... RVS works fine to but RvS will work with just about any thing made after the stone age if it supports the right features.. With how over-optimized RvS is you could probably run it on a Cuisinart without trouble :\ SWAT4:TSS on the other hand is quite sensitive to ATI/nVidia drivers and essentially resulted in an impossible to kill application.
All of the other computers here use AGP so Ic an't even test the card or a different card in the slot, so I hope it's the GeForce 6200 and not part of the Motherboard..
So it looks like I have to either give up on S4 or buy a new Gfx card.. I know I've often thought about upgrading if finances allowed but this does not make me happy. Data failure is cheap, use backups but when the hardware goes nuts what do you do?
Upgrade to GeForce 8400GS and it's fixed... Guess it was the GeForce 6200 going bad :\
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