While playing an online flash game, the system froze, and a barred pattern flashed across the entire screen.

I was forced to shut down the laptop using the power button. After starting up again, I was later playing the same game, and the system froze, The same barred pattern covered the screen, and this time the system emitted a loud beep, in patterns of 3, and continued to do so until i shut down the system with the power button.

Later, while running Windows 7 via boot camp, encountered a similar problem. The entire screen was covered in multicolored noise, and then crashed within a few seconds.

More on the barred pattern while in OS X:

The bars are multicolored vertical bars, spread across the screen in probably aproximately 50x10px rectangles, evenly spaced, probably 10px vertically, and 50px horizontally. This is not an exact description, but the best I can serve from memory. Will provide better description after reproducing error.

Given that a similar error occured in both OS X and Windows, I would assume this is a hardware issue.

Hardware as follows:

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: MacBook Pro

Model Identifier: MacBookPro8,1

Processor Name: Intel Core i5

Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 2

L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 3 MB

Memory: 4 GB

Boot ROM Version: MBP81.0047.B0E

SMC Version (system): 1.68f96