Does this mean my graphics card is dying?

Actually, I suspect that's the case, but I thought it'd be good to ask for advice here, since so many forum regulars are considerably smarter than I am about these things.

I have a Dell Dimension 4600, 1.5 GB RAM. My current card is NVidia GeForce 6200-- I'm probably lucky it can still run SL at all. It's been working fine until recently; I usually push the graphics settings to high, I get a lot of lag sometimes but it works well. (I've had this card for about three years, maybe a bit longer. The location in my device manager says PCI bus 1.)

Recently though (say, just within the last week or two) I've started getting random blue screen crashes. I don't recall the message on the earlier ones (sorry!) but the error-reporting webpage that came up after reboot would always say it was a driver problem. This has me confused, since I run Windows Update regularly and I recently updated my NVidia drivers to the latest version. I've also gotten 'page fault in nonpaged area' messages a couple of times, which (from what I've read) seems like it could be a variety of different problems. (Ok, now that I think about it, I recall getting 'memory management' once, and 'IRQL not less or equal' once or twice.)

The blue screen crashes sometimes come while I'm running SL, sometimes when I'm just on the internet; if I'm recalling correctly, at first it was mostly while SL was running, now it's more random. As a side note, I haven't been in SL for about 24 hours now, and I've had no crashes.

I know it's only a matter of time until I have to upgrade the video card, especially with a detail-heavy program like SL running frequently. I can't afford to replace the whole system right now, but replacing the video card would be doable.

So, my question is, does all this sound like the blue screen crashes are probably caused by an old/faulty/dying video card? And if so, what should I be looking for to replace it? I want to get the best one I can afford, I'm just not sure what would be compatible with my current system.

Thanks in advance for any advice, I'd really appreciate the help!

Hello there, with the variety of the errors that you are getting, it could be a variety of things causing your crashes, unfortunatly. Firstly, I would reccomend that you uninstall your graphics drivers and install the latest ones from the Nvidia website. I would also reccomend that you do this for your network drivers, as IRQL can be graphics and network (Amongst other things), usually you will need Realtek drivers for your network. IRQL and memory management and page errors could all come from your RAM. I would reccomend that you Take out all your RAM sticks (Im assuming there is more than one stick in there), and try booting your PC with each of the sticks (Only one at a time), and if a stick is bad, you should get an error on POST (Before you get to Windows), then you will know that stick is good for the bin! Also you can try running http://www.memtest86.com/ , this will test your RAM for errors.

Let me know how you get along,
Jin.

I've had the same set of circumstances with the BSOD with almost the same error messages (WinXP32 - Nvidia 8800). Everything seem to point to my video driver or my video card. But one of the "IRQ" messages made me think I might have had an IRQ assignment problem.

I used PC Wizard ( http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php ) to check my IRQs and found my video driver was conflicting with another driver for the same IRQ. I just had way too many drivers that I didn't need being loaded on startup.

Since I have got rid of the excess drivers, all has been well.

And now that Jin mentions Realtek drivers, I remember that my sound driver (Realtek) was the one conflicting with my video on the same IRQ. I just had too many assignments. After I got rid of the excess drivers, the video and sound drivers each found their own IRQ.

Sounds like the fan on the graphics card or the processor has got jammed with too much dust over the years, or maybe the heat sink grease stuff finally got a bit brittle and cracked.

Thus you'll get overheating and crashes. Very common thing.

Best way to check is a visual inspection, and to see if anything's loose or not turning.

If you have a cat, airborne cat fur is a #1 graphics card fan killer. Don't ask me how I know this. Yes, I blamed the cat.

Good luck with it!

I did recently check the NVidia site and install the latest drivers, after uninstalling the old ones. I hadn't realized network drivers could also be a problem... I do have a memory test that I've been meaning to run, I'm just having issues with getting the PC to boot from the CD that I put it on... I changed the boot order in the BIOS, I suspect I may be doing something wrong when I burn the disc.



Hmm, I'll try that!



Yeah, I know how that goes... we have two cats, and the fur gets everywhere! I do try to open it up and clean it all out once a month or so... last time I did was probably 2-3 weeks ago.

Thanks for all the advice so far, this gives me a few more things to try!

http://www.memtest86.com/memtest34a.zip Should give you the download to the one you can run in Windows

Likely as not, it's a driver problem. I have been hearing of some issues with the latest series of nVidia drivers. All the same, it is still a good idea to do a physical inspection of the inside of your computer to make sure it's clean and not covered in dust and debris, including the graphics card and its fan.

If, after verifying everything is clean, you still have problems, try rolling back to an earlier driver version. In the case of graphics drivers, "newer" does not always mean "better".

On your Dell, run the Diagnostics. FN+Power button for laptops. F12, select Diagnostics for Desktops.

If you mean the Dimension XPS 400, then it has a PCI Express 16x slot for video card.