Pass

The new video card is up and running. It came about like this. I reasoned that the problems I was seeing were somehow tied up in the drivers. Using a tool from the chipmaker (Nvidia) I found that my drivers were many, many versions out of date. I also suspected there was some corruption from the failed driver installation in the first go-around trying to install the video card. That led me to download and install the most current driver set. Success there.

Then, for probably the seventh time, I installed the video card. Booting up got me nothing but black screen. No BIOS flash, no windows loading animation, but the audio alert to choose a user did sound. Figuring the absence of the first two items was due to the motherboard video support being used I powered the monitor off and moved the connection from the new board back to the one on the motherboard. Restoring power, there was the user account screen! Aha! I shut the PC down (power off) and rebooted, stopping at the BIOS setup screen. There I changed the video support from "on board" to "PCI-E", the new board's architecture. I also made notes on how to undo that change if I still had a black screen. I saved the changes and the boot-up continued to the expected black screen. Moving the monitor connection back to the new board, there was the user account screen. Success. I meddled around a bit and found that Vista had associated the new board with the drivers I'd installed earlier (the new board also has an Nvidia chipset). I next brought up a couple web sites and found that not only did the windows draw faster, scrolling was considerably faster and smoother. Fran thought the scrolling was too fast and noted that her game-play seemed faster and smoother. Today she said the morning power-up was noticably faster. So now I can say

Success!!