Remember that little entry a couple days ago about not getting to play my racing games? Well, here's to another interference: My video card died.

I had to patch the game to play online, which required a reboot. When I expected to see my computer's POST screen, I saw nothing. My monitor reported no signal, so I powered the tower off then back on. At this point, I saw a "Refresh Rate Out Of Range" error on my monitor. I let it go, because the drives acted as though Windows was booting. When the video mode switched to 1152x864x32@75Hz, I saw my Windows login screen.

I went ahead and logged in an started the game, but saw something really weird. The picture was all distorted and had vertical lines all across it, making the images and text nearly impossible to see. It was at this point that I called the video card "dead".

I pull the card from my system and gave it a simple visual inspection. I tried to spin the cooling fan blades, but had no such luck. As I had kind suspected, the fan locked up and the GPU overheated, causing thermal damage.

So now, I've ordered a brand new GeForce 6600GT 128MB card (stupid 128MB limit on AGP cards...), and should HOPEFULLY have it tomorrow.