need hardware help

Hay guys. I'm trying to get my old computer up and running so's i can donate it to charity. It's really giving me problems though. The first is the most obvious - the display is messed up. I have vertical lines going down my screen of the wrong color. The number of lines and colors and thickness changes whenever the computer 'clicks over' to the next screen, you know what i mean. And when i try to install display drivers, the computer crashes and refuses to restart in anything other than safe mode. I even got the most updated drivers and it gives me the BSOD until i uninstall the drivers. Of course windows blames the crash on the card and/ or its drivers which would seem to make sense, but i was reading somewhere where that's not neccisarily the case. Anyway, i don't really want to put really much money into this, i was wondering if there are places that actually test and repair video cards, or if i should just get some cheapie to throw in there?

right now its running a GeForce 4 ti4200 AGP8x, manufactured by ASUS.
god this si so annoying.:banghead:

what OS? on 95/98/ME you may need to change the driver to standard SVGA and reboot with that setting before changing or installing video drivers.

as far as repairing a video card, I think it would be chaeper to just replace it.

XP, and it never gave me this problem before. The drivers are for standard VGA. I think there's something physically damaged with this card, becasue even without drivers the display is messed up. I dunno what storing the computer for a year and a half would have done to damage it, but that seems to be the case :-/

Probably the video card. If you really don't want to put any money in it, just buy a $10 card off ebay or something to get you by.

have you tried a different monitor?

Try swapping video cards, monitors and try different drivers (the most recent aren't neccesarily the best). :)

Its not the minotaur, tested that out, and any kind of drivers i use completely crash the system, who knows why. I'm going to try getting a little cheapie card, but i dunno how cheap AGP cards get these days? I've been out of the loop for a while when it comes to computers.

Just ask one of your mates if you can borrow any old card for testing, i wouldn't spend money on it :)