When I went to my Linux box this weekend, I noticed that the screen would flicker a few times and then go blank. It would come back for a few seconds and then the same thing would happen again. After checking all the connection to make sure they didn't come lose, I plugged another computer to the monitor to make sure it wasn't the monitor that was flaking. In the end, I determined that it was the video card, so I had to buy a replacement. I got a GeForce 6200 LE since it was wasn't too expensive and I don't need a fancy card for Linux. This is the second video card that has died on me this past year and it really shows that while technology advances the stability and quality of new devices often suffers.
Anyway, replacing it was simple. I popped out the old card and put in the new one. Restarted Linux which fell back to the generic NVidia (nv) driver so the screen was a little off so I had to tell it to use the vendor-supplied one which was already installed since the previous card was also an nvidia card. Fedora didn't list the card correctly (saying I had a 5200 nv30 card), but the Nvidia driver software did list the correct card as being installed. There goes 30 minutes and $80 of my time this weekend.
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