Hell Patrol

So I'm just curious here. I've had this error twice now in the past two years, with two different GPU's at that. I get a windows boot error that says "windows failed to start, a recent hardware or software change might be the issue". Then lists a few instructions about inserting the disc and selecting my language and hitting repair etc. The only options are enter = continue and esc = exit. Each time the error has happened I've hit enter and my computer simply restarts normally. However I was wondering if either option does anything different, (or if I should be hitting esc instead of enter, not that it seems to matter). Also if anyone has a clue what causes this to popup out of the blue. I'm not worried, but I am curious.

Yeah i tried both things but neither worked, its alright i suppose since i ordered a GTX 970 from newegg yesterday. Time for an upgrade I guess.

Don't know, I'll check. I don't think it's relevant though, I've been using this card with no problems for the past year and a half on the same bios settings.

It's not overclocked and it's a year and a half old. So unfortunately both of those are not valid to me.

http://m.imgur.com/58sDL9c

Going to get a few pictures of them right now, however I will say v-sync is irrelevant as these artifacts happen on my desktop itself with no games running.

I have made two threads about this in the gpu part of the site to no avail, all information needed is in them so I will simply link them here, though really only for information like specs, as I have solved most of the questions in those threads without help. i am typing this from a phone for obvious reasons, so grammar wont be great http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/447825-artifacting-help/?p=6004451#entry6004451 http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/448068-gpu-artifacts-with-drivers-installed-but-not-without-why/#entry6008180 my real current question is, considering the type of artifacting i have which consists of parts of the screen being black with distorted rows of the missing part of the screen stretching out from them, could that be anyhing but a bad card? ill include details of vital importance from those threads here my gpu is a r9 270x i have reinstalled drivers fully, even using ddu to make it a completely clean install i only have these artifacts with my drivers running so i presume they are broken gpu and not unseated gpu since unseated gpu problems would happen no matter what i have never overclocked and my temps were 40c when this began happening, a week prior i had checked load temps as being 70c under high load

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/447825-artifacting-help/?p=6004451#entry6004451 previous thread above for more specifics So this is a simple question and the final step in me deducing if i must buy a new gpu. Why would a gpu artifact with drivers installed but without drivers run fine with no artifacts? i'm convinced there must be some hardware reason but i really dont know how it could be, since the gpu works without them (obviously at a low spec) also sorry about any grammar since im stuck doing this on a phone something else weird too is this happened all at once, my gpu did not have a single problem until in an instant last night it went bad, after only a year of use and while idle at cool temps at that, read the thread i linked if you want any elaboration

bumping even though its probably useless, i have two more things to try but i can pretty much confirm its not mobo since it works fine with no drivers, presumably theres a separate little gpu its running on when i have no drivers in

i hate phones, had accidentally submitted an unfinished post when you had replied. however i can say as far as i know my gpu temps have never went critically high, even on the highest end games i play i was checking temps a week or so ago and they didnt go above 65-70c the motherboard is some gigabyte thing which is the same age as the gpu, will edit when i find it edit: ga-h81 with an i5-4670 8 gb of ram and a 2 tb 7200rpm hdd is what i remember, i could probably dig out my old build list and receipts and id every part but that is off the top of my head save the mobo

FIrst off, I will apologize for poor grammar. I am typing this from a phone and sacrifices will be made. So basically, I was playing a game and a ton of artifacting began. I closed the game and it continued to my desktop. I reset my pc and it remained, so I reinstalled my gpu drivers by going into device manager, uninstalling, and then running my installer to put them back, with no drivers I had no artifacting, but once back to normal gpu use it was there. i also know its not the wires or monitors, since i also have 2 monitors with two separate video inputs i know that it is neither cable nor monitor. My temps are cool when it happens as well (48c), my gpu is a sapphire vapor-x manufacture of the Amd r9 270x platform and my gpu is just a couple of months over a year old. So I ask, is there anything else to check before concluding 100% that it is hardware, did i not reinstall my drivers right? might it be not even gpu related? i want to. conclude by tomorrow, as i am in need of my pc for quite a few things right now and will simply express ship a 970ti if it being broken hardware is the case edit: starting to get a horrible hunch it might be mobo, the artifacts only happen when something is active on screen

Okay, so this is a really minor inconvenience but it's something that is a bit bothersome. For some reason my taskbar icons appear to be low resolution (the way they look in 16 bit mode kind-of, but even worse). Here's the catch, they only do this when pinned. If I unpin a taskbar icon while the program is open, the icon reverts to full resolution. Consequentially if I even right click it, nevermind pin it. It will go back to the low resolution state. I have confirmed the obvious, I'm running both monitors in 32 bit mode, I'm not using the basic color scheme, and my drivers and such are up to date. An interesting catch is that the start menu icons do this as well. Another interesting thing, is I managed to get the google chrome logo back to its normal look permanently. I am not sure how but it occurred after a restart in which I unpinned and repinned the taskbar icon. My gpu settings are all the same as they were before this happened as well, I've tried switching color schemes and I've tried changing from 32 to 16 bit and back multiple times, as well as computer restarts with all variants of those settings. I can't find a reason for this, and it doesn't appear to happen to newly added logos either. If I'm missing some information here, I'm happy to provide info as needed. This is a minor inconvenience as I said but one I'd like to solve (and certainly an ugly one at that). For reference on how they look while pinned and unpinned, here are crops. This is unpinned This is after a right click of the unpinned icon or after pinning it.

Someone can close this thread, I literally just figured it out after posting.

Going to hazard a bump purely off of the fact that the question hasn't really been answered and I'm still curious. Can a malicious software do what it needs to do (Mine information about you, keylog you, etc) when it exists only out of registry files. Or do those registry files just sit dormant.

Somehow accidentally posted the letter A while checking this thread.