electrical problems

[RKangel]

I've never seen this happen before, but my guillemot geforce 32 meg video card has started to do some strange graphic artifacting ever since, well, a tripped breaker caused by a vacuum cleaner. I've always meant to buy a UPS or something to stabilize the flow to the box, but I've never been known to be proactive when it comes to the welfare of my car...computer etc. I have noticed that the fan is on all the time, and is more noisier than it was before. If I let the computer sit, the problems seem to be minimized (just an occasional RGB smear over a few pixels). My question is, is there anything I can do to fix this card? I'd hate to throw it away and buy a new one, for it did cost me 3 bills back last december. I learned my lesson and I'm going to buy a UPS whether i need a new card or not.
thank you in advance,
rk

 

[mastertech01]

It may have just corrupted a driver file, or disturbed bios settings. Try the simple stuff first..scandisk, defrag...cold reboot.. shut everything down normal and pull the power and let it sit about 15 minutes..sounds strange but sometimes it will help recover the system to normal. Check all your bios settings and if nothing works then try removing and reinstalling all the drivers and/or software and last but not least you can try reinstalling windows. I would try all that before trashing that nice video card. And RMA is always an alternative to if you cant get it back to normal