Possible bad graphics card?

nikkhasnsi

Posts: 46   +0
Hello,

I have a stock Dell Vostro 200 with the Nvidia 8600GT 128MB graphic card. OS is Vista. About a month ago, my screen would go blank for some time and the pc would auto restart after 10-15 minutes.

I read in forums that there was an issue with the updated Nvidia drivers causing this. So I reverted back to the old/initial drivers provided by Dell. But the problem persisted.

I noticed that during start of the computer, the graphic card fan would stop functioning after sometime. That was the time the screen would go blank and the computer would freeze.

I then uninstalled the drivers and disable the card and the display was fine. Obviously, I did not get the resolution and power of the Nvidia card, but at least the computer restart issue went away.

Then after some time, the display started having weird lines. Can't really explain them, but the display got very hard to read. Like there was a refresh issue with the display. But , still no restart issue.

I was having the display lines issue yesterday as well. I ran Hitman Pro 3.5 for malware removal. It deleted some files and the display suddenly was fine. Could malware mess up display?

When I restarted my pc today morning, there were some windows updates and one was a Nvidia driver fix. Once I applied the update, I got a blue screen after restart indicating that some new hardware is causing it. I took a picture of the blue screen, I can attach it.

Has my graphic card gone bad? Or it is my monitor? Is there a test I can perform to check if my graphic card has issues?

Thanks

Note: I have already bought a Sapphire 1GB HD5570 card thinking I will need to replace my existing card. Can someone please list the steps to replace a graphic card?

Uodate: Started PC this evening and it started fine with the Nvidia card. Rebooted it once and the issue started again ie the PC kept rebooting. So started PC insafe mode, disabled the card and uninstalled the drivers. Still have the weird horizontal lines. Took pictures and will try to attach them.
 
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