I am still running windows XP professional SP3 on  a desktop machine. I am somewhat computer illiterate and a newbie so please forgive me. How can I tell if I have a possible video card problem? My video displayed on my LCD monitor comes from a VGA cable that connects to the video "whatever" on the motherboard I think. PC is pretty old but I would like to keep it for several more months until I can afford a new desktop. Finances are pretty tight right now. Can I buy a cheap video card? I have several PCI slots available that I can plug into.



When I right click on desktop icons, the context menu slowly fades in. Plus, I have had to REBOOT several times.....the computer hiccups and the font gets really blurry and all the images and icons displayed are huge and not clear. After I reboot, things are ok until it happens again and it is starting to happen more frequently. Please help. Can I just buy a cheap video card to get me thru about 6 more months or do you think I may have another problem? Any suggestions or help welcomed. Thanks for reading.Computer Make/Model Number could help to know what your system can handle for video card.

You could have something else going wrong that is causing this to happen, although it could be a GPU ( onboard video ) that is failing.

The only drawback to PCI video cards are that they are very limited in what they can render. The PCI bus is quite a bottleneck for graphics with AGP being the far next better, and PCI Express being the best. Also many 1999-2004 integrated video motherboards have an internal AGP controller and so the integrated AGP graphics even if only 64MB is usually better than adding a PCI base video card, however with one that is failing, adding a PCI video card and disabling the internal probably AGP bus type should fix for the problems you are experiencing if its just the GPU and nothing more serious.

The best video card you could probably get for this is like a GeForce 6200, although the PCI bottlenecks the performance greatly on the 6200, and the only benefits of the 6200 would be the EXTRA shaders and water effects of older games on this older system etc. Frame Rate will be poor with a PCI card unless its an old game etc. Newer games 99% of them will not run through a PCI video card, and the 1% that do run will run poorly.

As far as web surfing and youtube videos etc, the surfing and word processing would be fine, but you would see a degradation of performance when going from the preview video window of say youtube to full screen with more having to be rendered and the PCI bus being a bottleneck.

If your motherboard has an AGP slot, you can install a far better video card and have far better performance vs integrated. A video card such as a GeForce 7800GT in the AGP video card type wityh 256MB or 512MB would probably be far better performance than you ever had prior, BUT if you are buying a new system sooner than later you will not want to sink too much money into a video card, and PCI cards are usually pretty cheap especially if bought used, however buying used comes at risk of buying junk so be careful if buying used.

Hey Dave, you are the man. I think I understand the gist of what you said. I really appreciate the time you took to respond to me. Let me do a little more research and I think I have a simple followup question. I wish I had a better understanding of these technical things like you experts but I try to explain the best I can and I am constantly trying to learn. Again, thanks so much for your reply.  Much appreciated!Hey Dave,
Here is the exact video card I have now.

http://www.pcliquidations.com/-imageview/15158-20576/hp-5187-6146-radeon.html





What can you tell me about this card?Will this card from tiger direct work in my PC? What does  PCI-Express (x16) mean?

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=7373215&CatId=1558Ok your video card is more modern than I expected. This is a good thing.     This means that you can replace it with a modern card such as a Radeon HD5450 which is a low power draw card, but better performance than the card you have now.

If your motherboard also has a VGA port ( blue ) connection on it, you should be able to run the computer with this video card removed and running only on the integrated video of the motherboard. *This is an OPTION if you dont want to spend any money and dont use the computer for heavy gaming.

Below is info on your video card with the PCI Express in bold because this is the important connection type to the motherboard.

HP 5187-6146 Radeon X600 Pro PCI-Express 256MB VGA/DVI

Here is an ok cheap video card that should be able to run on your computer without a power supply upgrade needed: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150655&cm_re=hd5450-_-14-150-655-_-Product

This a Radeon HD5450 with 1GB VRAM and is PCI-Express and should work backwards compatible to your motherboard if PCIE 1.0 or 2.0. This is a 2.1 card, but 99% of them run legacy bus speed connectivity for 1.0 and 2.0.

I have the HD5450 in 3 systems of MINE and its perfect for light gaming and netflix etc.Funny that we both picked out the same video card.... 

Yes that should work fine. Quote from: DaveLembke on July 01, 2014, 11:01:21 PM

Funny that we both picked out the same video card.... 

Yes that should work fine.