Problems after installing my Geforce 9500GT

I check to make sure my system would should work with the card before i ordered it. I was just looking for a small upgrade to help with my gaming FPS.

I installed the card lastnight on my DELL XPS 410. Then went to Nvidia and downloaded the latest drivers.

The PC boots up fine and I can surf the web just fine. But once I try to do pretty much anything else, gaming, or even run a simple Disk Clean Up or Defrag I get the "This program is not responding" or the application does not open at all.

The Card is the Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT 1GB DDR2.

My system specs:

Processor - Intel Core 2 Duo E6420, 2.13 GHZ, Conroe

Mobo - Dell Inc., Model 0CT017, Chipset- Intel P965/G965

BIOS - Dell Inc., Version- 2.5.3

RAM - 1GB DDR2 (667 MHZ) x4 (So total of 4GB)

375W Power Supply

OS - Vista 32 bit

If anymore info is needed let me know and I will update it. Any help is apprecaited.

Thanks!

WTF? Doesn't that computer have a NVidia GeForce 7900GS in its stock configuration? Your 9500GT may actually provide slightly lower performance. Sure you can argue the 9500GT has DX10 , but it doesn't have the performance to run it at anything above a slide show. I wouldn't use DX10 on anything less than a Radeon 4650. O.k. now that I'm done complaining.

Did you make sure to remove your old nVidia drivers? The order in which you should have installed the card is to first remove your old drivers, then install the new card, and finally install the new drivers. If you just tried upgrading your drivers then you could have all sorts of messed up settings, especially on good ol windows Vista. Try uninstalling your drivers, and also boot up in safe mode and go to the device manager to make sure that it doesn't say 9500GT under display adapters. If it does uninstall it. After you do all that reboot your computer, don't let windows automatically install the driver, and then run the setup program for the nVidia drivers you downloaded.

If you do all that and it still gives you guff you may need to download drive cleaner or something.

I think the base card was the 7300 Lousy Edition or the ATI X1300, can't remember but I still have one of each in a drawer somewhere.
Always use DriverCleaner or Sweeper, whatever your preference.