Is My Video Card Going Bad?

Question

Ok Heres My Situation My Computer "Lags" or "Skips" after either Playing A Game, Watching A Video Clip, Or Sometimes For No Reason At All I Have All The Updated Drivers For All My Hardware This System Wasnt Built Long Ago Everything Is New Except the vid card and processor Here Are My Details THanks In Advance For Anyones help

System Specs:
Pentium 4 3 GHZ Processor
DFI Lanparty 925X-T2 MB
2GB DDR2 533MHZ Kingston Value RAM (Dual Channel) Western Digital 250 GB Sata HD
Nvidia 6800 256MB PCI-Express Video Card
Ultra X-Finity 600W Power Supply
52x52x52 Sony CDRW
Pioneer DVDRW Drive

Answer 1

I will give you a solution for this problem. Follow the instructions:-
Log off from Internet.
Run "msconfig" from Start-> Run, type msconfig in the text box.
Uncheck all programs which are not required by your system.
Reboot your system.
Stop Anti-virus, anti-spywares, firewall, Intrusion Detection softwares like WinPatrol etc
Stop the Motherboard monitoring software.
Now run your games and see if there has been any improvement.
If there is an improvement, then the defaulters are these programs which are demanding too much of your system's resources. You will have to decide what to stop and what to run. If you are playing games offline, you can easily stop all what I written above. If you playing online games, then you cannot stop the anti-virus, anti-spyware and the firewall.
If the system still doesnot run smoothly despite switching all the above TSR softwares, then, you have too many programs loaded on your system which are unnecessary.
I will suggest you backup your data and format your system and install only those softwares which are necessary.
You will no longer have any problems. Also please ensure that you have atleast 20% free hard disc space in all your partitions.

Answer 2

Probably not. Usually when graphics cards go out, they go for good. Although it's not unheard of, it doesn't happen TOO often. When you say skips, I assume you mean the computer freezes for a short time and blinks black or something? Try defragging your computer. That tends to make your computer skip and seem like it's your graphics card. Best bet that it has nothing to do with your graphics card. Another thing that will make your computer skip is if it's running to many processes at once. Even a computer with 2gb of ram and 3 ghz can choke. Press Ctrl+alt+del and close process you don't need.