[Pc_Support] Troubleshooting Help Needed

[Paul M Foster]

Folks:

It's been beaucoup years since I had anything serious to do with Windows 
boxen, and now I seem to have a problem I'm not sure how to approach. 
It's my wife's machine.

This is an XP Home Edition box, Service Pack #1.

My wife recently rebooted and had some "serious errors" come up. They 
were the kind of errors where Microsoft pops up an error box and prompts 
you to push the button to send them a report on it. (We didn't do that. 
I don't really trust Microsoft.)

One of these errors mentioned the Nvidia card. It's a GeForce4 MX 440 
with AGP8X. There looks to be a built-in AGP chip on the motherboard, 
but I'm guessing they jumpered it so that they could install this Nvidia 
card in the AGP slot. In any case, I don't recall the exact error. But 
since then, on occasion her video will "blink". It's hard to describe 
this. The only analog I can think of is when you install Linux on a box, 
and the OS tries various resolutions and speeds on the monitor to see 
what will work. It blinks the display until it finds the right specs. 
That's what this is like. It does it once or twice, and then it's fine.

When this all first happened, I opened up the case, blew out all the 
animal hair and dust, and reseated the video card.

In any case, given the meager information I've provided, I have some 
questions.

1) If this truly is a video problem, is it more likely a software/driver 
issue or a hardware/card issue? My thought was to have her uninstall the 
driver for the card and then reinstall it, since Microsoft OSes are 
known to have bit rot.

2) Is the above preliminary handling a reasonable approach?

3) Is it likely that a next step might be to reinstall the OS? Since 
I've never run XP myself, I don't know if this is a reasonable approach. 
It was for Win98, but I don't know about XP.

4) I don't know if we ever got a CD with the OS on it. Yes, it was from 
a reputable shop, but I'm seeing less and less giving CDs for the OS 
these days. Is this SOP?

5) I figure that if I ask Microsoft (?!) or take this to a repair place, 
the very first thing they're going to tell me is that I need to upgrade 
to SP2 or whatever service pack they're up to now. Any thoughts on this? 
I heard nightmares about SP2, so we never installed it. Besides, opening 
up our box to have Microsoft install software seems like a virtual 
guarantee you'd have to reinstall everything else.

Any assistance would be welcome. Apologies for the dearth of data. It 
only just occurred to me to actually ask you guys.

Paul