random characters on boot

[willbyrne]

after post my friends computer just displays random characters flashing on and off on the screen often multi coloured. hes ordered a new psu but cold it be the OS or a corrupt drive its really not my area of expertise so any help would be appreciated
weve already removed all plug in cards and tried 2 different hdds with vista on them to no avail
cheers
will

edit: weve tried installing fedora 9 and that seems to work but i cant understand how the drive would work for linux and not windows if it is a hardware fault. trying to reinstall vista tonight

[liljim]

Hey willbyrne, i've only seen that once and it was a bad 7900gt pci-e video card that caused it. Somewhere on this site i have a post on it with some pics of what the screen was doing. Right now im just rushing through the site but i'll try to find it when i can.

[liljim]

ok, found my pics.





this is what i got and it was the video card, the only thing that throws me on yours is you say its not doing it in linux. What does the bios or post screens look like?