ATI Radeon 9800 Scrambled display - Help!

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I'm having a problem with my graphics card.

Yesterday I started my pc and noticed a few squares that should not be there on the loading screen, as it progressed into windows there were 4/5 vertical bands of lines.
I restarted, this seemed to resolve the issue.

Today I started up my pc only to find the same problem again, so I restarted the PC again in the hope it would sort itself out but it didn't, it just got progressively worse.

My pc is a dell dimension 4600 by the way and came with a diagnostic tool in the boot menu; when I ran this tool it showed that there was an error with the graphics memory addressing.
After a few more restarts the screen goes blank just after the xp splash with the loading bar going across; so now I can't even get into windows with this card installed.

I physically removed the card and am now running on the motherboard graphics which is working fine.
The ATI card came installed on the pc and I've never had to do anything to it except the odd driver update (not recently though so this is not the issue).

I have used the pc for allot of gaming that would have always demanded all the power on the card.

Has my graphics card finnally reached the end of the road or would a simple driver update do the job? Has anybody else come across this issue?

If the card is broken, can it be fixed cheaply or is it a case of buying new is cheaper than fixing.

Drift

I had almost an identical problem with my brothers 9800xt last year ..... from what i could tell too many day long sessions of oblivion eventually got to it and it reached the end of its life. I couldn't complain it had served us well. Sorry to say I could find no way to fix it - had to buy a new card.

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Thanks for the reply Drift, At least I have closure.

As I feared, those lovely graphics for all the games have taken their toll on the poor card, I suppose I can't complain 3/4 years of service to a demanding master is all I can expect.