Video card degradation

[perdomot]

I think my old 7600GT card may slowly be burning out but am not sure if that even happens. I've heard of vid cards suddenly stop working but can performance degrade over time so that gaming and even opening windows slows noticeably? Thanks.

 

[mozirry]

I think eventually windows will slow down eventually if you don't clean out the programs you install all the time properly.

As long as your video card operates at the same frequencies, it will not degrade over time.

I think, unless you have some memory loss from heat, your card will operate at the same speed until something catastrophic happens (major heat, physical damage, power surge)

 

[Dazed and Confused]

Go to www.filehippo.com and DL "AVG Free 7.5" , "Ad-Aware 2007" and "Spybot S&D 1.5.2" and install all 3 of those, then update and run them ( On SpyBot S&D, remove the checkmarks from both resident programs like Tea timer ). Don't forget to run the immunization program under SpyBot S&D after you update it.

If you come up with 300 or more total infections between the programs, that's prob why your PC is so sluggish now. IF that is the case it's also time for an OS reload.

Another thing to do is go get a good third party disk defrag tool, I pref Perfect Disk. DO NOT USE THE WINDOWS DEFRAG UTIL !!!!!!

Also remove any installed programs from your PC that you don't need or use. IF you have Norton or McAfee get rid of them with the removal tools offered on thier sites, they are shit and can't hold a candle to the above 3 programs. They use more resources and cause more probs than they are worth.

Also do the CTRL+ALT+DEL and open your task manager, click on the "Performance" tab. Look at how much ram is being used ( in kb ) and at how much is free ( also in kb ). If you have less than 100,000 kb free, its time for a memory upgrade.

It might not hurt to DL all the latest drivers for all your hardware then uninstall, restart and re-install the latest drivers as well, this is a good option as opposed to a full re-install of windows and usually helps loads.

If you do all this and it is still running slow, it may be time to reload windows and start from scratch because I've never seen a video card slow down over time, as Moz said, they just die