Visual glitch in Windows 7 x64 (weird lines and color chips on screen)

Hello! This just came in: I have never seen anything like these glitches you are about to witness. It is hard to explain, looks like something to do with my video card.

It started for no apparent reason last week.
No new hardware, no new software.
NOD32 up to date...

First thing are these vertical lines.


Then my entire pc freezes like this. Sound stutters. Reset.


What follows are an infinite amount of possibilities for my computer to go back to normal or loop in a glitch-after-glicth rebooting madness.


Its a 3 year old build, no components renewed since it worked like new until now!
Do you have any idea what might be going on guys?



Thanks!

Holy wow.

Well, this looks either like a massive hardware failure of the motherboard going on (which would be extremely rare but not unheard of)...or it's the videocard. That's my guess actually.

Is it at all possible you've been dabbling with overclocking or installed any kind of software mod to overclock the videocard from Windows? Or some overclocking options provided by ATI's CCC (if you have an AMD Radeon card that is)?

It would be great if you could flesh out your System Specs and provide more information about your computer. I was wondering whether you had a laptop, but then made out from the first photo you have a ViewSonic 19" monitor, which means desktop PC.

But basically it's time to completely strip the PC down and disconnect everything but the bare essentials (RAM, keyboard/mouse and the display - if your motherboard has integrated video, use that instead of the card).

Then turn the system on, test the components, run memtest to check the system RAM, start plugging things back in one by one, testing between each. The goal is to try to identify what's really causing the video corruption.

But first, please provide as much detail about your system as you can.

Gracias Corazón for your excellent answer!
It was not that big of a deal after all..

After posting this thread I took off my nVidia card, used the onboard port instead, and presto. Not a trace of the problem.
Meaning I need to buy a new f*cking card!! I don't understand since I don't play games or try any OverC thingies!!

Anyways for people that come to this thread: uninstall & unplug your video card; if not solved, try RAM slots; after that, it might be a little russian roulette.