Our sixth Q & A of the week comes from Jon via the PCstats reader feedback page . If you have a question you need answered right away, try our friendly forums for help too.

Q: Recently, I have been having trouble when opening 3D applications where upon opening the program and the program going to fullscreen, it will show a blue error screen, then a memory dump and finally be reset. The error code, when searched on Windows, did not come up with anything precise but in part of the code, NVIDIA's name was mentioned. I have unbranded NVIDIA Geforce 4 128mb - really cheap, so do you think that the graphics card is faulty? I updated to the latest nvidia graphics driver and directx driver yet still the problem occurs.

A: It is possible that the videocard is faulty, though it's also possible that the trouble lies elsewhere. The power supply could be a source of trouble as the additional power draw of the videocard rendering 3D graphics could cause instability. It seems like this would be a random issue though. Since it happens every time you load a 3D app it's probably videocard or driver related.

What I'd do is: Check your PC for viruses and spyware first off, then use a non-3D burn-in application like Prime95 over the course of a day to see if the other components of your system are stable. If so, try some older versions of the nVidia drivers (you can track them down with an Internet search tool). If that fails, try to beg or borrow an alternate videocard for a day to see if you experience the same issues. Also, think back to any software or driver installations you may have performed around the time you started seeing the error.