Lagging question?

Question

I recently unhooked everything from my motherboard and rehooked it (for mainenance purposes). It still has the old operating system installed (I didn't reformat or reinstall the windows yet).
But all the 3D graphics programs that I'm running (moddeling, games etc) are lagging now, the movements are choppy and it is much slower in general. I need to brain storm of what it might be.
Here are the possibilities that I came up with so far:
1) I thorowly checked all the hardware (and tested it) the only thing that I've noticed there is a dark (burnt?) area at the edge of the Ram stick plug-in. Can my computer still run with the damaged DDR2 stick?
2) I simply need to reinstall my Operating System since it has been 6-7 months and I have been doing a lot of graphics work on my comp.

I understand that it is a very general question but if you can help me brain storm I would appreciate it.

Answer 1

Steps I would take:

1. first check to see if your PC is recognizing all of your installed RAM - that burn spot is a major concern. Is the burn spot on the RAM stick or the slot? If it's the slot, switch it to another spare one. Sure your PC might run with a damaged stick, however you'll get all sorts of problems (resetting, blue screens, etc) and may corrupt your data.

2. check your graphics drivers. Windows may have installed the default Microsoft driver once it was started back up. If it has it will either list the graphics card as a "standard VGA adapter" or by it's name followed by "(Microsoft)". If it does, download and install the latest version.

3. Check your BIOS settings. The BIOS might have reset itself to default when you took everything out. A long shot but worth a look.

4. Re-install. If the above doesn't solve the issue then a re-install will eliminate software errors as a possible cause of the slow performance.

Answer 2

made sure your video card fan is working maybe its over heating