Is it normal for a Dell Inspiron 530 to have is fan to spin up 3 times before it POSTS?

Solution 1:

While there have been answers to the part about the garbled screen, apparently the video card on the inspiron 530 (and the vostro 4000) - a gforce 8300GS is buggy, and the 3x power up attempts is fairly common with this model/configuration. Apparently switching the bios to boot off PCIe rather than PCI means it attempts to power up twice instead then boots normally.

Its not behavior common to dells, but with this specific model, its a common bug of unknown origin. The fix would be, presumably to swap the graphics card, but i don't think its worth it in this specific case.

EDIT: and.. apparently the system has integrated graphics, and popping out the card fixed the issue. I'd note, if someone can work out why this issue happens, with appropriate backup information, i'll select it as the right answer. Else i'll pick this.

Edit 2: And.. we might have a winner. The card's G86 based, and the laptop versions were notorious for overheating issues. It dosen't explain the random nature of the issues, or what exactly, but if someone else has similar problems and wants a why, this could be a useful, albeit sensationalist start. Even more digging yields this - and more interestingly "Random characters on the screen"

EDIT 3: The plot thickens - i installed windows 8, the windows 7 drivers for the card... and presto. it on powers the fans up once, then boots up like a decent system. i'm figuring it did some firmware replacement that fixed it up.

EDIT4: problem recurred. I'm going with onboard video for now

Solution 2:

It is a corrupt nvidia 8300gs. I had the same problem with my Dell 530s Desktop, took 3 times to start up, then the computer screen would freeze and even turned pink. I thought it was something terminal, then I read on a forum that it was a common issue with the Nividia 8300gs card installed. So I recently bought a Radeon 2400xt card, this card meets the low wattage requirements of your psu, 250w. I installed it and it now starts up first time every time. Problem solved.