Artifacts (yellow lines) on the screen

Hi, I'm really sorry for asking for help on my first post, but I've been having a problem with my Desktop PC that's really bugging me (no pun intended).

It seems that my computer freezes randomly and displays some artifacts - little yellow and blue vertical lines on certain parts of the screen. I've taken a photo of the screen so you can see what I'm trying to describe. I can't print screen because the computer freezes completely while doing this.

http://oi53.tinypic.com/14wglqg.jpg

As you can see, there are two vertical yellow lines on the bottom left corner of the picture, as well as on every piece of text, picture and icon. This doesn't happen too often (maybe once every two weeks), but it's persistent, so I decided to ask for help to see what I can do to fix it.

This is not the only problem my computer has had for the last few months. I've also been having some blue screens, but the computer restarts almost immediately after displaying the blue screen so I can't really tell what it says. I remember reading something like "Memory Dump" and a counter or something. These happen like every week or so.

Could this happen because of my video card? Maybe I shouldn't be running Windows 7 on such an old computer? Maybe I should get a new one? It's 5 years old now. These are my specs:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+
1 GB RAM DDR
NVidia GeForce 6100 with the latest drivers

Thanks in advance for your help, and sorry if this topic is in the wrong section.

NeonFlow said:

Could this happen because of my video card?

Perhaps.

It could be something as simple as a faulty driver, or it could be that the actual card or even the Power Supply is starting to fail (hence the spoaradic shutdowns and artifacts).



The best place to start is to have someone to look at BSOD chrash dumps:

Navigate to C:\Windows\minidump and zip the contents of that folder.

Create a new thread and upload the .zip file in the Crashes and Debugging - Windows 7 Forums section.

If it's a driver issue, then the crash dumps will tend to consistently point towards the same file. If the results are varied and inconsistent, that generally suggests that a component is failing.

Another way to attempt to rule out driver vs hardware is to check for artifacts during the machines startup (BIOS / POST) and/or running in safe mode.

If there are visible artifacts, restarts etc during POST or in Safe Mode, then it's hardware.