Hi there

 

First, apologies if I'm posting this in the wrong forum. I think my comp is in a lot of trouble, and I'd really appreciate any help from you knowledgeable lot! I don't know whether this is a graphics card issue or something completely unrelated.

 

I own a Dell Dim 4700 - recently I upgraded my RAM (bought from Dell), and PSU (to a PC Power and Cooling D470 - 470W, which has been working beautifully for over a week now); then on Saturday I upgraded my graphics card from a Radeon X300SE to a Geforce 6800 GT. It seemed to be working really well - the computer case was warm but not hot to the touch, I got no symptoms of overheating (artifacting etc) - but late last night I got a BSOD crash (sorry, but I can't remember the details on the blue screen - something about a 'thread', maybe??). When I tried to reboot, BIOS (A09) came up fine, but then I got the message that my win\config\sys32 file was either missing or corrupted! The instructions on screen recommended that I insert the Windows installation CD and use that to try and fix the problem. I did this (with the Dell Windows re-installation CD that shipped with the computer), but neither the CD drive nor the DVD drive seemed to recognise the CD - the auto-run seems completely disabled. Is my hard drive fried, and if so, is it because of the graphics card? It seems very co-incidental that this problem occurred only 24 hours after I upgraded some hardware. I've opened up the comp and looked inside - all leads are connected correctly (including the one from the PSU to the gfx card), and nothing looks melted! Trying system restore from BIOS did nothing.

 

Sorry for the ramble - I'm very worried that I've completely ruined my hardware.

 

Many, many thanks for any advice you can offer

 

My System: Dell Dim 4700

1024 DDR2 3200 RAM (4x256)

3.0 ghz P4

PC Power & Cooling D470 470 W PSU

XFX Geforce 6800 GT (256MB)

On-board Sound

160 GB SATA hard-drive