Ok, thank you guys! Miraculously got the card working, thank God. I am not sure how. My PC guru friend could not shut off the on board GPU - it wasn't an option, he said the board was incompatible, too old. I then took it home and somehow got it too work, wish I knew exactly how. I swapped cards back and forth and it worked.
So, new problem, BF3 freezes after about a minute of being loaded up into a game. It seems to work well with COD Black Ops and BF2, two old favorite games, but not BF3, which is what i bought the card for!! i went to Sapphire and updated the drivers. I turned off about 4 Nvidea video drivers and a Realtek sound driver because 3 sound drivers were running; AMD, Nvidea and Realtek. (I don't have sound without the Nvidea driver, so I left it), and I am making an assumption the AMD sound driver is from the video card, running through the HDMI port which is not hooked up. I tried to update the Mobo but could not – didn’t find that available. I went into the bios and turned the onboard GPU from on to - off if another card is present or something like that. BF3 still freezes after about a minute.
I am going to try reloading Origin and/or BF3 next, see if that works. I am open to any suggestions. I truly appreciate the feedback. One more thing, I could be off on the 8 year old comment, the PC is eight years old but I am not sure when stuff was upgraded as I got the PC from a friend – nothing seems to be OEM, so it should be no older than 8 years old and maybe as new as 6 years(?) Thanks again for the advice!
OS = Vista Business 32 bit
CPU = Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz
RAM = Corsair 4 GB dual channel DDR2 @ 400 Mhz
Motherboard = Nvidea MCP7A (socket 775)
Video Card = Sapphire HD 7950 (OC edition 900 MHz)
PSU = 650 Watt Rosewill