Last night my girlfriend was playing Sims 2 on my machine. She got a blue screen error that said something illegal was occurring with the memory. I'm not sure on what the exact error was (something with the page file) but she did say it was a blue screen error.

The machine was rebooted and when the compaq graphic started loading up it started breaking up and then nothing, just a black screen. Windows didn't even load.

This morning I tried starting the computer and I got a No Signal message. The hard drive was spinning, and the fan was running. I have two ddr RAM sticks so I took one out and tried booting with one. The machine booted up but this time it got to the windows loading screen and that logo started to break up (green lines appearing everwhere) and then froze. I turned off the power and then tried to start the computer again. Once again I got a no signal message.

I am running Windows XP Pro, and have Intel onboard graphics. Does anyone have any thoughts on what might be wrong with the machine.

Looks like your onboard video chipset may have failed. Do you have a diagnostics disk that came with your system? You want to confirm by running that first.

If your onboard video did indeed fail then you'll need to find out how to:
(a) disable the onboard video (usually a bios setting if you're lucky, if not then it's a jumper setting on motherboard)
(b) find out if you an AGP slot; if yes then buy an AGP video card, if not then buy a PCI video card.

Good luck.

Thank you for your quick response. I was able to boot into windows a few moments ago and so far have not experienced anymore problems. Everything is displaying like it should. I am not sure what exactly happened. The only indication that anything went wrong is that I got a message saying that windows recovered from a serious error. Sounds like it may have been a software issue. Again thank you for the reply.

Hi,
Sometimes, too many junk files and too many temp files that are no longer in use, just taking up space, can cause weird things.
If you wish to check out a free disk cleaner, that does a better job of cleaning out old junk than windows does, here is a link:

http://www.ccleaner.com

I am not sure this would have caused the crash, but it's still a good free program.
Best wishes,
fredg