For about 6 years i've had a NVidia 7300LE card in my PC and last week I bought a ATI Radeon HD 3650 as an upgrade.

Since then, the PC has been, let's say, "misbehaving". Sometimes it'll take quite a while to boot up, sometimes it won't. Sometimes if i'm playing a game it'll hang, sometimes it won't.

It never did any of this with the NVidia card.

And when I reformatted back to Windows 7 after my Linux shenanigans the other night, the PC was so slow to the point of being nearly unusable until I managed to install the ATI Drivers.

I don't think the card is the issue because the PC generally does run ok most of the time, but I'm wondering if i've essentially "over expanded" ?

I've got a generic E-Systems PC. Bought 2GB Ram for it, maximum allowed for the Mb. Got a Celeron 3.33ghz processor. Motherboard is a Foxconn P4M900-8237A.

(You can tell i'm running CPU-Z )

I've also got two HDD's - one 400gb IDE one with a 500GB SATA one that's plugged into a SATA Card that I bought to add.

I bought a new 400W PSU last year as my other one blew up - literally. I had a big BANG! and smoke started coming out of the back of the machine

Could it be that every now and again, it has a bit of a brain fart and struggles with the amount of extra gubbins i've added?

And i didn't deliberately type a sentence and press enter twice either

Are you using the latest drivers from the AMD website? Prior to doing this you should remove all traces of the drivers and software (Windows will just use a default vga driver).

I was going to suggest the PSU might be at fault but 400w should be ample for your system unless its a cheap and nasty one.

There is also a possibility that the problems are unrelated to the card and the timing is simply coincidental. Are you able to try without the card in, either with onboard graphics if available, or another card? Would also be worth downloading a copy of something like Hirens Boot CD and running some of the diags on there in case its something like bad sectors on the hard disk or faulty RAM even.

I didn't think to run some diagnostics on the hard drive actually - i'll do that.

I did grab the latest drivers from AMD as well.

I even, for that extra overkill, re-flashed and updated the BIOS with the latest version.

(Which, incidentally, means I can now boot from a USB stick )

I'll try the Hiren Boot CD first though and see how we go, then i'll see how it performs without the card.

It's working fine at the moment and just booted up fairly sharpish as well.

you have all the motherboard drivers etc installed?

I haven't been able to find any for this particular MB. The BIOS update has been the only thing i've managed to dig out - the PC is a good 6 or 7 years old.

For various reasons i'd reformatted again last night and reformatted back to windows 7.

the first thing I did was to click on the program to install the graphics drivers and i swear blind it must have taken the best part of an hour to install one program.

after that, it was fine - although this morning when I booted up, it sat on the BIOS screen for about 5 minutes until i pressed the reset button and then it booted up ok.

might have the opportunity to run a full surface scan today though - going out for a few hours so might kick it off before i go.

Your new card might be faulty.

i suppose it's possible, and knowing my luck, highly probable

but then i've kind of shot myself in the foot by chucking the box away .. doh ..

Not having the box shouldn't matter if the graphics card is faulty.

Its just proof of purchase and a suitable box to return it in that you need after contacting the seller.

I still think the problem lies elsewhere. Or at least there is more at fault in the system than just the card itself.

Trying a known-good card would be the most straightforward next step. If the motherboard has onboard graphics that would suffice for the sake of testing. It would be worth keeping the replacement in for a few days to confirm the problem doesn't come back at a later point (bearing in mind the problems seem to be intermittent).

If you don't have another card you can test with it would still be worth taking the card out anyway and make sure it is re-seated properly.

My motherboard doesn't actually have on-board graphics unfortunately. I did double check the card and it's definitely seated properly and quite solid as well.

It's running fine at the moment and boots up ok. it just seems to be an issue when the drivers aren't installed.

thought i'd point out that i'm completely talking out of my arse

i found the motherboard manual and saw that it does have a VGA port.

It also has 2 SATA ports, something which I didn't actually know!

I bought a SATA card 2 years ago to run a 2nd HDD because i thought it didn't have any !!