What explains the garbled message "Start Wandows Ngrmadly" in text mode? [closed]

http://imgur.com/M3sni

When booting up Windows, why would it say "Start Wandows Ngrmadly", instead of "Start Windows Normally"?

I tried googling for an explanation, but came across too many hits of people merely ROFLing at it.

Solution 1:

This looks a lot like a memory issue (or at least a glitch, since it doesn't repeat everywhere), a bad video card (I remember having this problem once, turned out to be dying capacitors in the video card) or a corrupted file. What happens is that one of the bits in the character is getting toggled.

From an ASCII character table, we can see that i is character code 105 (1101001 in binary) while a is character code 97 (1100001 in binary). A difference of 8 (i.e. the 4rd least significant bit).

You can notice the same happens for other characters: d in ASCII is character code 100 and l in ASCII is character code 108.

Solution 2:

Your graphics card is very likely to die soon. Its an old system and you need to replace either the graphics card or the system.

I've had a similar thing happen in the past, without further information, its just guesswork though.

It happened in both the bios

And the windows XP installer

This happens with a specific family of Nvidia processors dating back to about 2007 that had a design flaw - they overheat and the BGA soldering between the processor and board cracks or otherwise gets damaged. This is just one of the possible failure modes, but it will eventually die in a terminal and rather total fashion. The system here was a desktop with a 8300 GS, but I've had a 8800 die. The inquirer reported that this was very common for laptops running G84 and G86 processors and to round it off, dell actually replaced many laptops for the same reason - there was even a class action law suit.

I'd probably check if the same thing happens everywhere where you have a pure text mode console - I found this symptom is massively consistant. This seems to be a laptop - a short term solution (to try at your own risk) is to force the laptop to overheat. The long term solution is to rework the graphics chip.

For a desktop, you can try baking the card ( try 8800 baking ) on google.