Old GeForce FX 5200 Says Bye Bye
The old GeForce FX 5200 graphics board in my even older but reliable PC running Windows XP became unusable after years of service. You can see the first problem during the BIOS boot process where the GeForce boot info characters looks odd. Windows XP begins the boot process with its splash screen. But, it soon switches to a blank screen. Sometimes a screen of noise fills it up with an arrow cursor from XP. Other times, the screen just remains blank the LCD goes into sleep mode because it doesn't detect any signal. My guess is that corrosion of the solder points of one of the two graphic memory chips caused a short circuit. You can see the suspected culprit in the photo above.
I used the on-board graphics output to keep the PC running. However, after years of looking at the GeForce provided display, Windows XP looks horribly aliased and slow using the graphics chipset provided on the system board.