Chapter 1 : Bootup
Chapter 2 : Services
Chapter 3 : Drivers
Chapter 4 : Video Card and DirectX
Chapter 5 : Antivirus and Spyware
VIDEO CARDS
If you have specific video cards that you know of, such as an ATI or NVIDIA video card, then you should be visiting the manufacturers’ site to download new drivers for your card every couple of weeks or so.
Here are the links for the two most common card manufactures
ATI
http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html
NVIDIA
http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp
Make sure you download the correct drivers for your card. If you are unsure use the directx diagnostic tools to check. Start/run then type “dxdiag” and press enter
Allow the tool to load up then hit the Display tab. This will show you your card model and manufacturer.
As you can see in Figure 6, my card is from ATI and is a Radeon 9700 Pro. Actually, my card is a Radeon 9500 Pro, however I am using a third party BIOS for my card which WinXP recognizes as a 9700 Pro. This allows me to overclock my card, which if done improperly will kill your card. So I recommend you do not BIOS flash your video card unless you are absolutely sure you know what you are doing.
Figure 6
Now that we have the dxdiag tool loaded, click on each tab and look at the bottom notes. If there are any problems it will tell you there. If you find problems then reinstall Directx. At the time of writing this, the current version is 9.0c, which you can find out under the first system tab. You should always be installing the most current version and never try to install an earlier version. Get directx directly from Microsoft to ensure you are getting the latest version.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.aspx?displaylang=en
Chapter 1 : Bootup
Chapter 2 : Services
Chapter 3 : Drivers
Chapter 4 : Video Card and DirectX
Chapter 5 : Antivirus and Spyware