Gainward Nvidia 6800 GT (256 mb RAM) dying!

During the attempted installation of a new printer (HP 2580 all-in-one), my system froze solid.( AMD 2.075 gigHz Athlon, 2 gigs of 400mHz ram, two IDE HD's and one SATA HD. MSI mb). I rebooted and discovered that it took 20 minutes to boot to the wallpaper screen. I attempted to reinstall the printer's drivers and it again froze halfway through the installation. Reboot, 20 minutes, etc. After the third reboot, I left the room for a bit and came back to the "blue screen of death" on my monitor. "Win XP has shut down to avoid further damage...." I gave up and took it to my local IT specialist, PC Club. After the tech was finished with the test, he found out that the HD's were fine and that my Gainward Nvidia 6800 GT video card had had a major stroke and was down to about 1/10 it's normal speed. My question to this forum is this: Do video cards normally die in such a fashion? I had noticed stuttering and micro-freezing of the display for about 6 mos prior to the "blue screen of death" appearing, but had thought that my PS was being intermittant. Is it possible that the RAM on the video card wassomehow overheated? There is a fan on the card, but I do not remember if the RAM had heatsinks on the chips. I have already purchased a new 6800 card w/ 512 mb of RAM so I just want to prevent a repeat of the incident. Thanks.

Did you try safe-mode?Blue-Screen of death is usually caused by installation of a new hardware. It looks like ur printer is the culprit here, so remove the drivers and the printer, then see if you still get it.

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No, dont put your card in a friends computer, it might fuc theirs up. Borrow their card temporarilt to see if it works, or better yet, do you have a backup card, or integraded graphic controller