System: Gateway FX7026 GPU: 8800GT Here is the run down. 1. About 2 years ago lightening hit outside my house and fried my MBs internal Net Card. I added a PCI/Net card to the motherboard. Fixed. 2. A few weeks ago my PC started shutting down at times and refusing to start. I noticed due to the inside of the GPU being very dirty, it had been over heating quite a bit. I cleaned it up. Seemed problem was solved. 3. A week ago, my graphics started crashing and recovering from black-screen. And the PC would at times shut down while I was out and wouldn't turn back on again. When I set the graphics settings to the bare minimum, and it was cooled off, it would go without a graphics crash for some time. But then would keep crashing and upon restart go to Blue-screen. Deciding to closely give a visual inspection, I seen some chips that had heat damage (melted in the center) on the Motherboard. 4. Figuring my issue was only my Motherboard I ordered a new one and put it in today. Now, the crashes did not happen until I updated my GPU drivers. I reinstalled again, updated everything (except NVIDIA Drivers), no issue..but then updated NVIDIA driver and BAMM! when I started back up it goes right to black-screen at Windows Sign-on. When I started in Safe-mode and rolled back the GPU driver to just the 'Standard VGA Graphics Adapter' it would again be able to restart and no black-screen. Note: My 'Windows Experience Index Score' for my Graphics used to be either 5.8 or 5.9. Now it is 1.0. (w/o NVIDIA drivers installed) And 1.0 at the rare times I was able to see it (when they were installed) right before it crashed. **Question: So is this a bad 8800GT GPU? I figured that maybe since the MB had an issue, like a car part that didn't get fixed fast enough, I messed my GPU up. (I am a PC novice).**
SOLVED! I initiated a HD scan/repair from Device Manager, removed my bad twin HD, restarted, installed Graphics Drivers, and BAMM!! all is now well. :]
