Troubleshooting Display Problems
Earlier, image displayed on the monitor used to by processed by the CPU and sent to the monitor via the video adapter (also known by various other names such as display adapter, video card, video board, video display board, graphics card, graphics adapter etc). To change the images on the screen, a computer needs to change individual pixels. GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) and image intensive application increased the burden on the CPU and the RAM, causing a performance hit on the rest of the system .To overcome this bottleneck, accelerated graphics cards were introduced. These took over the image processing takes from the CPU, and, as is common in technology, graphics cards have becomes complex sub-systems in themselves. A typical mid-range graphics card is like a mini-motherboard with its own Graphics Processor, memory (RAM) and even a heat sink for all the heat gemmated. With growth in complexity came the increase in price, which led to a kind of reverse incorporate where motherboard manufactures began to incorporate the graphics card directly as ‘on-board’ or integrated graphics adapters, and given graphics handling capability for general use .
Troubleshooting the video subsystem requires a basic understanding of what kind of graphics card you have – on board or
Concepts
System bus : All the components and peripherals inside the computer such as the CPU, RAM, hard disk, graphics card, etc. communicate with each other via a data highway, generally referred to as the system bus or simply the bus. With continued improvements in technology driven by the need for faster communication between the various components, the bus has evolved over time. The older buses were ISA, ELSA, MAC and VLB. We now live in the PCI, AGP and PCI-Express (PCle) buses. Each is faster than the pervious one.
PCI: The most common bus on modern motherboards, with a maximum transfer rate of 133 MBps. The major drawback with PCI is that it is an ‘open’ highway. That is, all devices use the same highway mostly on a first–come-first-saved basic. If the is fully in use , the devices would have to wait in queue till they get their chance. It ‘s too slow for the graphics – rich 3D applications of today.
AGP : Strictly speaking, AGP is not a bus a port. However, in terms of computing, its behavior is more like a bus. AGP is a special kind of bus designed for exclusive use by graphics cards. This various other components. AGP 8x has a maximum transform rate of slightly more than 2 GBps.
PCle : This is the new standard in graphics and system buses. The increasing high-bandwidth demands of modern applications and

Devices have led to the development of the PCl-Express bus 16x delivers data transfer rates at a whopping 8 remember that PCl does this by "serial communication at higher clock rates" as against the parallel communication used by all earlier buses.
Windows Memory Diagnostic
The file (mtinst.exc ) that is available for download at Microsoft's Online Crash Analysis site (http://oca.microsoft.com/en/win diag.asp) can be used to create a start-up (floppy) disk or an ISO image file (windiag.iso) on your hard disk. Once you have a bootable CD/floppy ready, boot the machine using it. This will load the Windows Memory Diagnostic with a DOS-like user interface. The first test pass begins; you may choose to pause it or just exit the memory test. If the pass completes without any errors then it is unlikely that second pass will find any, as the consequent tests will use the same test settings. Press [T] for a detailed inspection of the memory module. This process consumes a lot of time, machine on through the right.