Do I need to buy a whole new Video Card?

[Leffdaddy]

Hi, I bought my desktop about 1.5 years ago when I first came to college. It is a Dell XPS 400 Media Center edition, dual core 2.8GHz 1GB RAM, pretty standard machine. I bought an nvidia 7900 GS video card for it, and it also has a TV tuner card. About 2 months ago I got a nasty virus called "virtumundo" I had a really hard time removing it with normal tools but eventually I found a specialized program from Dell designed to kill it.
While I had it my screen would flash every few minutes and many games had strange video problems, certain objects would show up as black squares, strange lines to nowhere and random colors on some surfaces. I thought I was done with it but a few of the strange effects remained. As time went on they seemed to get a bit worse and now it's just plain ridiculous. I used to be able to play bioshock on full settings and now it has problems with minesweeper and I get a blue screen if I try to run ten year old games. Even the TV function has stopped working.
My question is whether my video card is completely fried and needs replacing. I have tried a total reformat and it did nothing at all. Thanks for any help

 

[wolluf]

Obvious thing - try the card in another machine (a friends?).

My initial thought was that you hadn't got rid of virtuamundo - it IS very difficult to remove. But you said - a reformat - that should do it. Also, I've seen a number of infections by it, and they never cause graphics problems like you've had. So I'd suspect your card (or monitor) - but would try elsewhere first.

btw - has that Dell got onboard graphics? (haven't checked it out - and you said you bough card, so...). If so, does that work? (just remove your card and plug into onboard vga).

 

[Nelviticus]

It sounds like your card is on the blink, as the symptoms you described are what happens when the memory on a graphics card gets too hot - you start to see 'artefacts' on screen.

I think you were just unlucky that this happened at the same time that you had the virus. I don't think the two are related.

Is the card still under warranty? If so return it. Don't mention the virus as that will just confuse things - just tell them that the card is faulty.

Regards

Nelviticus