51

Start Wandows Ngrmadly https://i.stack.imgur.com/BFWkA.jpg

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.

6
  • 2
    LOL...looks like your computer's text display driver got confused. I really don't know what to say.
    – Andrew Sun
    Jun 30, 2013 at 1:39
  • 4
    FYI: From what I can tell, this isn't from the OP's own computer. The OP simply wants an explanation for this behavior. Because the OP is not experiencing this himself and can't take corrective measures directly, I have voted to close this question as "too broad".
    – bwDraco
    Jun 30, 2013 at 3:12
  • 2
    Since the OP isn't actually experiencing this, it is impossible to get a definite answer, so I think this might turn into a discussion. (Try search by image)
    – Alvin Wong
    Jun 30, 2013 at 4:06
  • This is a great question. Perhaps it should be protected to prevent multiple answer s that say the same exact thing?
    – Ramhound
    Jun 30, 2013 at 6:34
  • 3
    You totally missed "Safe mode wath Fetwgrkifg" Jun 30, 2013 at 9:48

2 Answers 2

32

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.

2
  • 4
    This could be a file corruption too, if the strings in the boot-loader got corrupted. I would run memtest and re-install windows, in that order. Jun 30, 2013 at 2:15
  • 6
    In every fourth character, the 8 bit is 0.
    – tgies
    Jan 19, 2016 at 15:35
33

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.

enter image description here It happened in both the bios

And the windows XP installer

enter image description here

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.

7
  • Alternatively, and with less chance of damaging capacitors/silicon chips/resistors, various other components if you have a heat gun, remove the board from the case, take 5 perfectly level stands, something soft like plastic or wood to lay it on, 4 corners 1 in middle, set the heat to max setting, with it 6-12 inches off the board move it around the board for 30 seconds to a min to prevent localised expansion, and then focus in on the processor for 15-20 seconds at about 3-4 inches, back off and let it cool, do not touch it whatever you do.
    – user88311
    Jun 30, 2013 at 3:32
  • 4
    Personally, I consider the best option is to realise its gonna die, then get a new video card or laptop.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Jun 30, 2013 at 3:33
  • +1 as I too have had an 8800GT in exactly the same way (while it was still under warranty, thank goodness).
    – user3490
    Jun 30, 2013 at 7:05
  • 1
    This may be very naive but what does the graphics card have to do with the spelling of a word? What exactly are the missing steps in the argument "since the graphics card is messed up....we have garbled text on screen"? Jun 30, 2013 at 10:35
  • 5
    @FixedPoint In text mode, video memory simply contains the bytes indicating which character (letter, symbol etc.) to print at which position. If memory is corrupt, the wrong character will appear, making the words look misspelled. Jun 30, 2013 at 14:49

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .