Urgent Help needed- My graphics card is not working

[Janey72]

Hi everyone
Please could someone possibly help me as I have very limited knowledge with computers.
My pc has been acting oddly these last few weeks. It's been freezing,crashing and the graphics have been very hit and miss.
Well anyway this morning someone advised me to update my drivers, which I did and now my screen resolution is buggered.

I'm using a Ati Radeon X1650 graphics card.

After updating the drivers my screen resolution is now stuck at 640 x 480 and the colour quality is stuck at the lowest rate (4bit)
I've tried rolling back the drivers and even a system restore but to no avail!

I don't have the original installation disc as I was given this pc by a friend.

Please could you help me? I've no idea how to correct it.

thanks in advance

Janey

[Dj-Icer]

Hi and welcome to TechIMO.

When does it happen? While you're playing PC games, is it?

Well, you could try to use the main board graphic first, to see if it is your graphic card problem. If it is the cause, then somethings wrong with it.

It seems to me that something is so highly unstable in your system. Do you remember anything at all what was your last installed programs on the day that you think it started to happen so awkwardly?

What I would do is, I would reinstall Windows or repair it.

[Janey72]

Hia
Thanks for the welcome and for replying.
The pc was crashing regardless of what I was doing on it. My son does play pc games on it or should I say was.

I can't think of anything different that I was doing on the pc that made it start acting up.

I only use the pc for surfing the web. I hadn't installed any new programs or components either.

This is why a friend suggested updating the drivers as this might solve the problem.

However that was not the case and its totally wrecked my screen display instead.

If I was to run the windows disc over the top of my current windows installation and click repair, would all my files and folders etc be safe? or will they be erased?