New Video Card Not Working

This is more or less what I did since I got my Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS. (I bought this card because I was told by someone on Majorgeeks that it would work fine with my PC; also I did a bit of research myself.)

1. I take it out of the package.
2. I remove ATI Radeon X300 graphics card (without installing the drivers) from my Dell XPS 400 service tag 3GBJY81. (I made sure not to generate static electricity.)
3. I plug in my new Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS.
4. I Turn on my computer. Everything works fine; I can tell Windows properly loaded the generic display driver because the resolution is at 800 X 600.
5. I go into Windows and allow Windows update to install the driver. I then realize that the driver Windows Update installed for me was an out-of-date driver (the driver it installed was v275.33, but the current driver is v280.26). It asks me to reboot, but I don't reboot. I uninstall the out-of-driver through Add/Remove programs.
6. I restart my computer.
7. Nothing is showing up on the display at all. I've let it sit for roughly 10 minutes and still nothing shows up.

My guess is that it's not loading the generic display driver for the graphics card like it did when I first plugged the video card in. Does anyone know how to get it to stop trying to load the drivers from Nvidia (which I uninstalled :cry) and instead load the generic ones like it did when I first plugged it in?

There might still be traces of the Nvidia driver but I have no idea where it is or how to get rid of it! I tried system restore; that didn't work. I tried Driver Sweeper 3.1 (stupid of me, since it's such an old program) but that didn't work either.

Another guess of mine is that the ATI drivers are conflicting with the Nvidia driver. But that doesn't make sense sort of because I think I uninstalled the Nvidia driver, so it should just be loading the generic driver like it did in the first place... ugh! I'm going in circles here. I would uninstall the ATI drivers just to see if that would work but then if my ATI card didn't work anymore I'd be screwed!

Curse you, Windows update!

(In case you're wondering, I've been switching between old and new video card in order to access my computer then test out whether my fix worked. Of course, it hasn't, and currently I'm on my old video card.)

Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

When you have your 8400 installed can you see the boot up screens (ie the black screen with white text)? The driver does not get loaded until you get into windows so if you are getting no output at all from the card then I think your card is probably dead and should be RMAed.

If it only bails out when it gets into windows then the card may be OK and it could be a driver issue