Is my Nvidia card broken?

[Kate Leiko]

Hi. My laptop is quite old (5 years) Acer Aspire 5270, core 2, 1gb ram .

After I reinstalled my Windows 7 i tried to install Nvidia drivers (i did it a lot of times,it was always fine). Laptop worked fine without driver but obviously I could not open bigger games (Sims 3) and some programs and windows aero doesn't work.

So I downloaded suggested by official Nvidia website driver ( for some reason it said for notebooks, is that the same as for laptops?) and successfully installed it and as system asked restarted laptop.

After restart everything went wrong, it was massive pixels on the screen, windows didn't fit, and colours were not wright.

I restored system to the latest point and it was ok again, i installed driver again and restarted. This time it was fine but wrong resolution, so I changed screen resolution and the same pixels problem came out.

I tried to download different driver, used driver genius, chose driver manually, and even tried to download it from torrents site. Reinstalled windows few times. Nothing works.

Does this mean my video card is broken? Do I need to replace it?
Its Nvidia Gforce 8400

 

[arges86]

I doubt you need to replace it (although it is kinda old).
my guess... is that when you re-installed windows, it installed its own drivers first, which are conflicting.
Whenever you do a fresh install, always install graphics, chipset, ect. drivers before you apply any updates or service packs.
Then you can update your other software systems.

I hate to say it, but i would try to re-install Windows again, and install your software and updates in that order.