Student's Outlet

Two weeks ago, our family PC (running Windows 7 Professional) won’t turn on. So, what I did, I unplugged it’s power cord, and plugged it back and *poof*.. Power’s back!

After waiting for it to reach it’s desktop page, my monitor suddenly gets refreshed every three seconds, and when it got stable I got this error message “Displaying driver NVIDIA Windows kernel mode driver, version 197.45 stopped responding and has successfully recovered“. Since i don’t know what does the error means (and since it is Windows), I did some troubleshooting. I Google-d the error message and did whatever solution is available out there. Display is refreshing continuously whenever I look at pictures, and whenever i watched videos. By the way, my video card is 8600 GT512 MB Inno3d. So here’s a list of solution i found and did:

• I reinstalled my video card’s default driver – it’s back up CD when we bought video card. #didntworkout Still the same error after rebooting.
• I did a Windows Update, and Windows found an update for the video card (since I installed the old one) but suddenly things got worse. After restarting Windows, which in case it (always) needs before the updated drivers could be used, my monitor suddenly displayed something like this (but not exactly like that) – screen got frozen, and colors got mixed up:



• So what I did again, I looked for the latest driver of my video card at NVIDIA’s Site and installed it in my system. #stilldidn’tworkout
• So, the last troubleshoot i did was to look inside my tower, and take a closer look at my video card. After disassembling my PC, I saw this:



Here’s a closer look of its capacitors:





It erupted. Tsktsk

• So, i just concluded that it’s a hardware limitation already. I think the fan of my video card isn’t anymore working, and too much heat causes the eruption of the capacitors.

So, i learned that fan is really important to every computer. So, always clean it and have a good power supply that could distribute power well to every part of your PC.