My gateway pc is new (6 months old), and from the very start the Google earth program crashes the pc and then reboots automatically. When running videos the machine crashes and reboots sometimes. In some ocassions during a video sesion, the monitor display a very scrambled image and I have to tun off the pc manually. I am using Vista home premiun. The pc is a gateway GT5435E/2Gb Ram/AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual core 4600 2.4 Ghz/2x512 Kb L2 cache/2000 mhz system bus. The graphic card is NVIDIA GE Force 6151 SE. Wow, this a lot of data from the front face of the pc. It seems that this is a BMW car with a small Volkwagen radiator. But it bougth it from Sam's for $900 with a 22" gateway monitor 1680x1050 maximun resolution. The Vista trouble shooter reports an unrecoverable hardware error that stop the operating system to stop functioning. In six months this pc has crashed about 20 times. I think that the grapic card is damaged and I'm not going to send this machine to the Gateway in the US. I would like to install a new card to substitute the graphic chip. There are are three available slots: two pci's and a red one wchich I don't know it's use. (I already open the pc and lost the guarantee). I would appreciate that some of the forum members kindly recommend me an Nvidia card with a lot of memory. The actual graphic chip shares RAM memory. I do not play games, but work with videos and photos (I am an amateur photographer) and make a lot of multitasking. I do not know what means SE in the card specifications. I only know that the slot is PCI. And also, ¿shall I upgrade the power supply, wich is 350 watts? Thaks, monty9
Which graphics card you should use depends on the case's size and ventilation primarily. How many fans does it have / can it have? I strongly recommend ensuring all potential spots for fans are used if you add a decent graphics card as GPUs often dramatically add to the heat output of the PC. You will also need to replace the PSU, and get something decent, not just any old heap of junk. Something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139003 Of course, when I say something like, I mean ideally exactly this. You should never skimp on the Power supply, as doing that can be dangerous, and potentially lethal. As for the graphics card, unless you're a gamer, you don't need anything fancy, but you don't want your system RAM nicked. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127296 Cheap, but it gets the job done.
