Problem with booting up pc and occasional crashes

I've had a couple of problems (may be the same problem?) develop on my windows 7 pc

Started with occasional freezes which always seemed to be when I used Chrome. This developed into crashes were I'd get flickering cyan magenta etc bars on some of the screen, again mainly with chrome but then also with other programs. Once this got bad enough (ie several times a day) I did some maintenance - cleared up the registry and defragged it, checked the disk with no problems, removed most of the programs I was no longer using and cleared a lot of crud off the disk. This made the problem drastically improve, the number of crashes dropped right off. In fact it's not crashed for a couple of days

More annoying I've also started having problems booting up. I would get a black slightly flickering screen when I turned everything on. I can hear all the windows boot up sounds ok. Up until a few days ago if I booted it up again everything was then fine and windows started ok. And if I had to do a reboot during the day that was fine too. It was only happening when I booted the pc up first thing in the morning (unfortunately I can't keep it running all the time). However it now takes several boot ups to get working. Sometimes unplugging the monitor from the back of the pc seems to help or that might just be coincidence. This problem hasn't got better with trying things with the pc.

Unfortunately I've no system restore points before all this started happening. I had wondered about doing a windows repair and / or restore but I though I would see if anyone had any other advice first

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Thanks for your help and replies

Think I may have solved the problem as I've borrowed a different monitor and it booted up fine and seems to be now running without any problems.

I've got a replacement monitor on order and I'll see how it goes with that

gsw said:

Thanks for your help and replies

Think I may have solved the problem as I've borrowed a different monitor and it booted up fine and seems to be now running without any problems.

I've got a replacement monitor on order and I'll see how it goes with that

I was going to say from your initial post that it sounded like a GPU or Monitor related issue. Your new monitor should have a driver cd so install the monitor driver instead of using the generic MS driver. If you continue to have problems the first thing I would do is remove and reinstall the GPU drivers. Good luck.

New monitor sorted out the boot up problem but it's crashed again a couple of times.

Previously I had updated the graphics drivers. Well I'd downloaded and run the program from the AMD website

I'll try the monitors cd...