Upgraded Dell Inspiron to Win XP, worked fine then display went haywire

[abarrows]

I have an old Dell Inspiron 5000 model ppm that came with window 98, I had the error message "cannot find explorer.exe, reinstall windows" and I installed window xp onto the computer. It worked perfectly and must faster than I had expected for about three hours, I then shut it down and upon start, the screen was distorted with inch long, horizontal lines. It is so bad that I really cannot access anything on the computer to fix it. I can't get into BIOS because it is the same there and therefore I cannot startup in safe mode either. Help! 

[stevejohnson1958]

Have you tried a different monitor?

[abarrows]

Yes, I have. It shows up the same. I have been tweaking the properties a bit and it helped a smidge but it is still quite unusable.

[JJ 3000]

If another monitor does the same thing, then I would think it a motherboard issue.
Open your computer up and blow all of the dust out. Now see if you can get into BIOS.

[stevejohnson1958]

Before we blame it on the motherboard...do you think we should take a look at the video card?