I'm experiencing hardware problems with one of my machines. Ignoring the rest of the symptoms I was curious about one of them.
When I enter the BIOS, random characters are screwed up... as in, replaced by random characters.
What kind of hardware problem would this point to?
Maybe your graphic card has some problems, you may give a try with another card. You could also put in your question the others symptoms as there may be a correlation between them.
It could be anything really...power supply not giving correct voltages, RAM failing, BIOS itself got corrupted, graphics card failing, etc. Only way to be sure is to use the standard PC hardware diagnostic...swap parts one at a time until you find the part(s) that were failing.
Ya, if you have a warranty, now is the time to call it in :-)
Leave the computer off for a while to make sure its not heat and see if you have the same problem. If this is an older computer, you can probably buy a new one that is faster for cheaper than the replacement parts. So basically, it may not be worth the time, you could get another one and donate this one.