Thanks for the reply Platypus. I already have physically taken the video card out and cleaned in and around the connectors and did notice a little bit of dust build up. I also checked the motherboard for some of the things you listed like a buldging capacitor, but didn't really find anything out of the ordinary. The garbled text now only appears very infrequently upon a cold start up. I do notice that when this problem does happen, once the screen reaches my desktop I notice a popup error message coming from a red circular icon in my taskbar, but I am unable to read it as it's to blurry; I was only able to make out the word 'display' in it. Once I do a system restart everything appears to be running fine, so maybe I will update my drivers, because as you said it's never a bad thing to do that. To do that would I just download the driver package listed on the NVIDIA website for my card and install it, without having to do anything else? Thanks again, Platypus. -Phrozen