A possible problem with my Video Card?

[Sting]

Hi guys.

I’m having a little problem and I think its dealing with my video card. I don’t know if it could be an outdated driver, or if my on board video card: Nvidia GeForce 6100 nForce 405 is going bad. Before I purchase a new video card though, I think it’s best to try an update the driver. Then again, not being a PC tech, maybe it’s even a bad stick of Ram? I don’t know!

My problem deals with at times my screen will lock with lines in it, making it unusable. It may be a green background with yellow lines, or sometimes a black background with white lines. This has been happening over the last 2 months and occurs about once a week. I have to do a hard shutdown to escape. Ctrl/Alt/Delete doesn’t work in this situation. I’ve run both Virus and Malware scans, and find nothing. Then after I do a hard shutdown, I’ll reboot and run an error check, which with Windows XP takes a long time. After the check is complete, my system is sluggish, documents take longer to open, Jpegs open slow, so I have to reboot again and then everything works the way it should, until the Green or black screen with lines reappears.

I went to Nvidia website and downloaded their: “Driver Tuner” which is suppose to scan my system for outdated drivers. I’ve tried it and it shows that I have 10 outdated drivers, from my video card, Sound, video and game controllers, Imaging devices (HP printer), and IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, just to name a few. Under Device Manager and letting Windows check, it finds none! Go figure.

Is this Driver Tuner by Nvidia reliable? And if I should update my video card with the driver they’ve suggested, I know when downloading a new driver under Device Manager and letting Windows find and install it, you have the option to rollback to the old driver if something isn’t working correctly. If I install this Nvidia driver and run into problems, does anyone know if I will also be able to rollback to the old driver?

Any help would be truly appreciated.

Thanks for your time,

John

[The Dude]

The video drivers I've downloaded direct from Nvidia have a clean install option that will remove any previously installed driver. I'm currently running 296.10 on my GT 220. I only update drivers though Windows update as a last resort if I can't find one online. I don't know what Driver Tuner is but it sounds like something I wouldn't personally use. I'm not a big fan of getting drivers from third party sites unless its really old hardware that the original manufacturer dropped support for.

EDIT: ops, I guess I should have at least one cup of coffee before posting. I've tried the Nvidia driver detection utility before and it didn't work very well for me. GeForce 6100 nForce 405 is pretty old stuff so you may have to go into the legacy section on Nvidias site to find a driver. From the sounds of your problem my guess is its hardware not software. If you can scrounge up a discrete video card to plug into that board I think I would try that.