Hi guys,
I'm relatively unfamiliar with computer stuff, so I apologize in advance if I make any rookie mistakes in my post.
I've recently been having with my 4 year old pc:
Intel Core2 Quad Q8300 @ 2.50GHz
4 gb ram
GeForce 9800 GT
Windows Vista
Playing Skyrim last week I began noticing pop-ins and some strange object flickering. Then I started getting freezes. Finally it got to the point where if I tried to continue a saved game, or start a new one, the screen would flash a bunch of crazy colors before freezing and I'd need to do a hard reboot.
I had installed new nVidia drivers fairly recently, so thinking that that might have been the problem I rolled back my drivers to the previous version. Still no luck. I then tried uninstalling my drivers from the Device Manager, rebooting, and doing a clean install of my drivers. After this, my 9800 GT showed up in my Device Manager with an 'Error 43' message, and I was stuck in low-res mode.
Now my BIOS screen is all scrambled at start-up with weird symbols, and my computer freezes on a black screen with very faint, little green lines shortly after the Windows start-up logo appears. The only way I can start my computer in normal mode is if I uninstall my 9800 GT drivers in safe mode before rebooting.
Is my gpu toast? How should I proceed? Realistically, I'm about 6 months to a year away from being able to afford a new pc, so what I'd really like is to buy a cheap interim graphics card for the time being. Is Newegg my best bet to find a cheap replacement card?
I'm relatively unfamiliar with computer stuff, so I apologize in advance if I make any rookie mistakes in my post.
I've recently been having with my 4 year old pc:
Intel Core2 Quad Q8300 @ 2.50GHz
4 gb ram
GeForce 9800 GT
Windows Vista
Playing Skyrim last week I began noticing pop-ins and some strange object flickering. Then I started getting freezes. Finally it got to the point where if I tried to continue a saved game, or start a new one, the screen would flash a bunch of crazy colors before freezing and I'd need to do a hard reboot.
I had installed new nVidia drivers fairly recently, so thinking that that might have been the problem I rolled back my drivers to the previous version. Still no luck. I then tried uninstalling my drivers from the Device Manager, rebooting, and doing a clean install of my drivers. After this, my 9800 GT showed up in my Device Manager with an 'Error 43' message, and I was stuck in low-res mode.
Now my BIOS screen is all scrambled at start-up with weird symbols, and my computer freezes on a black screen with very faint, little green lines shortly after the Windows start-up logo appears. The only way I can start my computer in normal mode is if I uninstall my 9800 GT drivers in safe mode before rebooting.
Is my gpu toast? How should I proceed? Realistically, I'm about 6 months to a year away from being able to afford a new pc, so what I'd really like is to buy a cheap interim graphics card for the time being. Is Newegg my best bet to find a cheap replacement card?
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