stupid graphics driver

Got a 512 MB Nvidia Geforce 8600 for my old pc and its been nothing but problems... the pc stays on till about 1-2 minutes and then reboots... I have no idea what to do...

At first I thought it was probably my windows, but then even linux was having problems... I even tried an xp setup disk and it restarted over there as well...

oh yeah, been getting the bsod a lot of times...

[ace]

Did you try rolling back the drivers and updating to the newest ones from nvidia? I have evga 512mb geforce 8600 and haven't had any problems with it for like the past year on 64bit w7.

Did you buy it new? Might have been doa.

[monkeymaximus]

try loading it up in safe mode and rollback the drivers (like ace said). also make sure there was no dust in the slot that you put the card in. Dust can mess with the card / slot.

worked fine till I was connecting my headphones, and I might have accidentally touched something, and then it went crazy...

1st, the memory check in the bios (old desktops) has a different value than before...

2nd, it loads up till the place where windows tells me that it did not shut down properly and bla bla bla, but whatever option I choose, safe mode, last known configuration, start windows normally, the pc just restarts...

3rd, I tried putting my windows setup disk to try to repair the installation of windows but same problem there, it loads the files and then it restarts...

I know the simple solution would be to throw it out of the window and get a new pc but I'm 14 and sadly my dad isn't interested in buying a pc right now...

[monkeymaximus]

try pulling out the ram and putting it back in (possibly only part of it to make sure the RAM isn't borked).

leave the side / top off when doing this to make sure the PC isn't overheating. Are all the fans working? Video card / Motherboard etc...?

last try going back to your old graphics card and see if that fixes anything.