Some questions to clear up about my PC....

I bought a 7300GS at the beginning of the month. It got installed well, and I was able to enjoy some games on it until I could buy a better card. But now, for the past 4 days, my hdd kept failing to load XP, so whenever I try installing the OS again, it takes forever for my DVD/Cd-R combo to open it, and at most times it can't detect the hard drive, or it hang up while copying the files. So in a desparate attempt to fix it, I don't know what came to my mind, but I removed the gfx card, and it was all better!

But what questions me is if it was the graphic card that was the problem, how come it wasn't causing any problems through out the whole month, and all of sudden the PC breaks down and when I remove the card it gets better?

Thats question 1, now here's 2: Which of these cards is better? Both are in my budget with only $20 difference:

HIS HD4850 512MB 256-Bit DDR3

OR

GeForce 8800GT 512MB 256-Bit DDR3

Could be a hardware conflict, or maybe (and this is a stretch) the 7300GS is using too much power and not enough is being provided to the other parts. But like I said, that's an extreme stretch.

And the 4850 is definitely worth it.

Whats a hardware conflict? I am also doubting though that it could've been taking too much power from the power supply, but isn't a 350W power supply enough?GameWiz47

I don't have 2 hard drives, just one 80GB Sata 2.

But could it be a fault in the Hard Drive itself? Cause it was working well with my graphic card until 5 days ago...

Whats a hardware conflict? I am also doubting though that it could've been taking too much power from the power supply, but isn't a 350W power supply enough?GameWiz47

Yeah, a 350w power supply is enough BUT I take a wild guess that your PSU is not a good quality, good PSU'S got to be hevy , cheap ones tend to be very light, check yours

I believe the psu is not giving the correct amount of wattage it says on the box, that's why it's works ok sometimes and others fails

did the psu came with your pc?

sometimes to keep prices down these companies get cheaper components, that's why it's better to build yourself

OK, im going on a limb here But I once got a bad videocard that failed whenever it was installed on the motherboard, had some chip corrupted and it worked fine for a few minutes then it started with artifacts, after that some other components started failing and I remember that we tried a lot of things

but nothing worked until one of the guys tried taking the card away from the mobo and it worked, the biggest problem we had is that the hdd failed whenever the card was present.

the fact of the matter is that there could be a lot of reasons for your problem.

^ Yeah, but sadly, I don't live there anymore...

Perhaps you guys could help find a PSU from this link and maybe even a mobo from here (since I'm thinking of getting a better one). Forget the prices, they're in Rupees, but I'll need a good mobo from Intel or Asus under Rs.10000

I don't doubt that you're running that setup on a 250W power supply; however, GameWiz isn't going to be able to run a HD 4850 or a 8800GT on a 350W, so he'll need to upgrade.

EDIT: After looking at both of those lists, I would get a ASUS P5K-VM and a Corsair 520HX.

EDIT #2: Wait, what motherboard are you using now that you think you should upgrade?

Yes, you would probably be wrong. Chances are that you just got a bad graphics card.

Your motherboard is fine, so just upgrade your power supply and get a new video card.