My video card may have died today. Well actually it sort of half-died. My computer wouldn't start up without going into safe mode first and uninstalling the nvidia drivers. And now my computer only detects it as a generic adapter. This means I won't be using this rig for gaming without replacing the card cheaply or building a new pc to replace this 6 year old rig. The latter is more likely to occur in the near future. But in the mean time, I have to live with the extreme vertical tearing that occurs when dragging windows or scrolling up and down pages, which is quite normal with no video card drivers installed. But it doesn't always do that. On these forums, for example, I can scroll up and down pages and topics seamlessly. Is there a way to make it always behave like that even without drivers?

Have you tried reloading the nVidia drivers?

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

If your card died, it wouldn't work at all. You could have just had a corrupted driver.

Device drivers do corrupt, so try a reinstall

as in, reinstalling drivers?

I guess I should have mentioned that I already tried doing that, they seem to finish the install process but then the same problem occurs as before: Windows won't start up nomatter what after it reboots, so I have to go into safe mode and uninstall them again.

and the auto-detect tool on geforce.com/drivers doesn't even detect my geforce card anymore.

and I get bands of white dots all over the screen on the boot screen and the windows xp loading screen. If I set the color to 16 bit instead of 32 bit, I get green stripes running down the screen. I guess I should have mentioned that too.

Yup, should have mentioned it. NOW it sounds like your card might be going.

What card do you have and what games do you run? You might be able to get a fairly cheap replacement to keep you going.

geforce 8800 GTS

I actually haven't played PC games in quite a while, which is why I was never in a hurry to do a new build. The few modern games that I did put lots of hours into (Deus Ex: HR, Mass Effect 3, Skyrim) weren't that demanding though.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007709%20600030348%20600007321%20600337485&IsNodeId=1&name=GeForce%20GT%20640 are pretty good. They get all their power from the motherboard, so the size of your power supply shouldn't be an issue. I've got a couple of http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130796- small, quiet, and cool with a fair amount of power. There are quite a few lower level cards out there for even less.