But I guess I have to...

I've been working really hard to get myself a new graphic card and finally I bought one. My brand new, sparkling Albatron GF4 Ti4800SE arrived.
Everything was fine until today.

I was playing Unreal 2 and after about 10 minutes graphics got reallyt screwed up. So I turned the game off. After doing that the monitor was acting like it would be changing resolutions and it didn't want to stop. So I rebooted my system.
And right then all hell broke loose....

XP was unable to detect my graphic card, so I installed the latest detonators and... and since that I have artifacts all over the screen and I still can't install the driver.
I tried updating BIOS but it didd't help at all.
And the best thing is that I bought that card on ebay. The guy, who sells them has a perfect record and the card has no warranty.

Those kind of things keep happening to me for the last month. It really, really pisses me off even though I'm a rather easy going man.

Does anybody have some spare good luck to give away?

I wish it could be that easy. The card is down, not the software.

I get artifacts even when I'm in BIOS.

I spoke to the guy and fe said he'll replace it. I am a bit surprised that he is willing to do that, after all a week has passed since I got it...

Anyway, I tried ti install my old Intel 740 card and... the werid thing is that I had very similar problems.
So... I cleaned my motherboard reaaaly good to get rid of any dust, I cleaned the card's pins as well, reseted BIOS and I scanned my system for viruses. I had one worm that was active, so I decided to reinstall the whole system to be sure everything is gone.

And... I have no idea why but everything is fine now.

There is no ligic in that for me. The card had problems even before it started loading any operating system, moreover I had the  same problems at my friend's PC.

Once again logic has failed me when it comes to PCs.

heh, my screen now is expeirencing minute flashes of a fucia color, very breif unnoticable unless i watch for it...weird