PC crashes with horizontal colored lines

[Wetzel267]

Hello,

Recently i changed my systems page file to increase it to around 4gigs, it was previously 1.7gigs. Within a day or so my computer started crashing to a white screen with horizontal colorful lines that take the colors of the last page i was on. This almost always happens when i am browsing the web and never really happens while i am playing a game. After i got this for a few days i set my page file back down to system recommended size however i still get the crash.
Obviously i messed something up and i'm not 100 percent sure how i can fix it. My computer knowledge is decent i'd say but i don't know a whole lot when it comes to the "technicals" of hardware and such.

Specs:
Emachines running XP
AMD Athlon 2650p Processor
Nvidia Gforce 6150SE
2.7G DDR2

Thanks so much

[rubberman]

Assuming this is 32-bit XP, you can't use more than about 3.5GB of RAM (about 0.5GB of the 4GB max is reserved). This means you can't have more swap space than that. Newer systems that support PAE (Physical Address Extension) can address more RAM than 4GB, but the OS also has to support it, which XP does not AFAIK.

Anyway, if you have rebooted the system with the swap file set back to 3.5GB or less and it still happens, then I think you have a hardware problem, which is likely just coincidental with your increasing the swap space.

[mjdodd]

I agree it looks like hardware, could be video card, memory or the screen. All of these can be checked by swapping for known good ones.
Whilst it is unlikely to be the swap file but it could be that the hard disk has a space that is not recognised and it would be worth running chkdsk or similiar to test the hard disk for errors;
M