screen flashing every couple of seconds, then getting "USB Device not recognized" error

[macewank]

The other day I started having a problem where whenever I would leave my machine running long enough idle, when I came back my screen was all messed up.. Kind of beige, and the icons from the taskbar (XP) had moved to the upper corner and where kind of ghosted... I couldn't really interact with any menu at all forcing a hard reboot.

I replaced the graphics card thinking that might have been the issue, but now I'm not so sure because the error started happening again today. Right now the machine is running memtest86+ (just started) and I'm hoping its the ram.

does that sound like a possible symptom of bad ram since the video card has been replaced? maybe a bad motherboard? CPU? PSU? how would I go about diagnosing which one it is since theres so many choices. I don't want to throw any more parts at this thing than I have to.. i'm poor lol

any help is greatly appreciated!

 

[olmer]

Can you off/on NumLock led while frozen? If you load BIOS/DOS and leave it long enough do you still have lock ups? Dust? Temperatures? Most likely a PSU anyway ? that would be the first thing to check after memory.

 

[macewank]

it never locks up.... however, right after the screen comes back on i cant use the mouse/kb for anything at all.

i havent tried seeing if the problem occurs in bios, i suppose that's the next place to check..