[gladi8r300]

I have a Compaq Presario computer with Windows XP SP2 Home Edition.
On one day, I decided that I needed to buy the game Portal by Valve and Steam because of its critical acclaim.
I bought it, got it home, and installed everything without any trouble. Then I tried running it. Then a warning screen came up saying that my graphics card drivers were out of date. I figured that I didn't really need to (my computer was made in 2005, I have fairly good graphics on my computer with this ATI Radeon XPRESS 200), and I couldn't fin d a good driver update for my graphics card, so I did something that I look back on now as very stupid: I played Portal without doing anything. It seemed to work fine until the 4th level, but that's when the computer, I suspect, started to kill itself. The screen went blue and white on half of the screen, black on the other half of the screen. It then proceeded to make strange pinging noises until I manually shut it off.
Now whenever I try to turn it on again, it loads for awhile, then freezes up on me.
I am currently typing this on a Wii because I have no other computers. Please help, anybody!
--gladi8r300

[Doug Vitale]

I highly doubt that playing a video game with old video card drivers would cause your PC to act this way (but hey, stranger things have happened on rare occasions).

Based on your description of the incident, I would guess that your PC overheated either because the fan died or there is too much dust built up around the vent. Another possibility is that your video card (or another hardware component) is malfunctioning.

Try booting into safe mode and see what happens:

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/chsafe.htm#02

If your PC did overheat, it's possible that your motherboard or CPU suffered bad damage.

[gladi8r300]

Thank you.
I am now able to type this on the computer in Safe Mode with Networking.
However, I am still unable to turn on the computer regularly.
I'm thinking of taking it down to some hardware place and trying to get the guys there to fix it.
It is a problem, however, since my hobby is game programming and Safe Mode doesn't like people who test games on it.
I can't find anything that fixes the computer, so hopefully the hardware people will be able to tell me if this computer is junk or can be fixed.
It's a very strange bug, the computer just hangs right after it loads the Windows Messenger icon on the screen. I can move the mouse, but am unable to do anything else.
Still being hopeful...(Sigh )
--gladi8r300