Video Card/Display problem

So a buddy called me out of the blue with a sudden video card problem this morning. Hes running an AGP Savage4 32 mb video card with Windows XP and when he boots up, the display starting at the Gateway screen starts flickering, streaking, and completely unreadable for the most part....going in and out, and he says no software and hardware changes were done. When it boots to windows, the same unreadable display is there and the computer is randomly restarting itself. I've ruled out the monitor. Got to safe mode somehow, still the same display. Managed to even get an earlier restore point in which seemed to help for a little bit but then the same issues started up.

What are my options here? It's so frustrating when I cant even get into windows to check the driver or see anything discernible to work with. And to boot he doesn't have any of his driver CD's or XP CD's :cry Would this be a case of a corrupt driver or the video card just crapping out? I have an extra PCI GeForce MX400 I can put in, is there any special process I need to go through going from AGP to PCI?

Thank you in advance

 

Turn off the computer, remove the agp card and install the pci card. If you get a clean display on reboot, you will have proved the agp card to be faulty. I wouldn't recommend leaving it installed though because performance will be crappy. It's probably time that your friend invested in a new card anyway. (The 32mb Savage card is a bit dated) A new 128/250mb agp card can be bought very cheaply nowadays. Look for a good brand of card such as Leadtek or Gigabyte that's been around for maybe 1 or two years which will give good performance for a reasonable price. Tell your friend not to spend too much money on a new card because his computer is probably dated as well, and it wouldn't be warranted.

 

Most of the time no you don't need too, but some motherboards you have to go into the BIOS and change it from AGP to PCI or Auto