I have had this Com for almost 5 years, with the same monitor, and have made no changes to the original equipment, with the sole exception of adding 256MB of memory.
Monday night, I booted up to find that my Screen has darkened, everywhere but the bottom row, about the height of the Taskbar, which is the normal full brightness. The rest of the screen appears as if the settings have been cranked WAY down. Visible, but very dark. I have switched monitors, adnt eh same thing happens, so I am assuming the Vid Card is toast. Is there any way to be sure, without going out and opening my com up to install a new one? Lots of time and money for no return, not somehting I would enjoy doing.
Is there any other way to check the viability of my Video card, or am I just going to have to put in a couple hours and some cash to find out the hard way?
Thanks you for your time.

The first thing I would be tempted to do, without opening the computer, is to download
the latest drivers for the video (graphics) and try them.

The manufacturers website is at below site.

http://h20180.www2.hp.com/apps/Nav?h_pagetype=s-001&h_lang=en&h_cc=us&h_product=82702&h_client=S-A-R163-1&h_page=hpcom&lang=en&cc=us

OK, I think That the drivers just might be the problem, but I have been unable to find a plce to download them, the above link does not get me to a Video Driver/Graphics driver download. (just about every other component, but not the one I need)
I have a NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS, Loaded into a HP Pavillion 9800 Configurable PC.
When I have a look at my system information, it lists the Drivers for this item as "not available"
Granted it's part of the vmm32.vxd, but since I can run WinME(it just looks terrible), I don't think the whole file is bad, just this one part of it.

Anyone know where I can get it? NVIDIA doesn't carry a driver specificaly for it, though I was unable to figure if they have a blanket file for GeForce2 drivers, so it could have been there and I missed it somewhere.
Thanks again. I have not had much experience with troubleshooting my system, as overall I have had VERY few problems, and this one is annoying more than anything, as I am sure it's a small fix, I just haven't been able to FIND it.

What version of Directx are you using?