Think my video card's busted...

[tiesto]

Damn, so every time I go to play a movie (AVI in WMP or Quicktime), I see all these green rectangular bars over the video picture. Go into fullscreen mode to run ZSNES, see those same green bars. When I boot up the computer, I see these bars appearing over the Windows logo... regular XP seems to look fine, though. Tried reinstalling the video drivers, with the latest version (my video card is an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro) and that made shit even worse... after the initial install, the computer hung, so I rebooted (this happened every single time I uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers)... then after the reboot, video ran fine, but ZSNES wouldn't even run (kept on getting "directdraw errors"), MAME looked really fucked up, and scrolling in a browser wasn't smooth at all, it had such a low refresh rate.

Anybody face similar situations? Is it safe to assume that I'll need to replace my video card... and if so, any recommendations in the $100-150 price range? Also thinking about getting another gig of RAM.

[ananus]

since videos were running fine afterwards, it might not be a hardware issue. if i were you i'd format it before buying anything.

[Scurvy Stan]

Get a driver scrubber and make sure the old driver is completely gone before you install a new one. And try a driver that's a couple versions older since old cards and the newest drivers often don't mesh 100%.

[tiesto]

You know what... I am pretty sure just the video card was busted, after all the tests and stuff I did on it. I ended up getting a new video card today, was only like $120 or something so not too bad. Everything seems to go in order now.