Weird Video Problem

[ajhutton]

EDIT: whoops, wrong section, could a mod move this to 10.4?

 

 

A while ago i installed using the XxX 10.4.10 dvd. It worked fine but needed patching for the onboard lan (8139)

 

Then my cat decided to pee on my motherboard .

I got a new one and booted into XP which proceeded to blue screen .

I tried OS X and it worked fine and needed a small patch for ethernet and audio .

I had it working for a while and made a few modifications (edited the rc file to show the word "OS X X86" in huge ascii text).

Then just recently i updated to 10.4.11 using the 10.4.10 update guide.

It worked fine and i booted up to 10.4.11

 

Recently i was watching some southpark in quicktime in full screen mode.

The screen started randomly turning black (not freezing or anything) and after a few seconds it would go back so it did this:

 

Normal - 10 seconds - Black - 2 seconds - Normal - 5 seconds - Black. etc, etc.

 

I then took it out of fullscreen mode and it was fine.

I tried to make the window fill the screen (as big as i could without going full screen) and it started the whole Normal - Black routine.

I made the window a bit smaller and found a size that wouldent make it go black (about 3x4 inches).

I watched a few more 30 minute episodes without a problem.

Then it started blacking out the screen (even at this small size). I reduced the screen to less than an inch and it was still doing it.

Just then i got a Growel notification that my gOS (google os) download had finished and i quit quicktime and burnt the image.

Then i installed gOS and had a bit of a play and then realised how bad it was and returned to os x (via acronis os selector).

It booted as per normal, but when it launched the loginwindow.app it went to a blue screen with a mouse (i always get this for a second when booting) and after a second that was gone, the screen went completely black.

The caps lock light went on and off when i pressed caps lock (meaning it wasnt frozen).

I then booted up into safe mode and i dont have any issues, i tried playing south park full screen and had no issues.

I have never had this problem in XP before.

 

My system:

Nvidia GeForce 5200 FX

2.6 GHZ P4 (SSE2)

1 GB RAM

 

All i am wondering is:

Is there a way to fix this?

What are the disadvantages of running in safe boot all the time?

Is this a hardware or software issue?

Do i need a new graphics card?