Solving GeForce 5200 Issues, driver download and more

If you get blue screen of death (BSOD) a lot, if your favorite games freeze and crash, then you have stability issues with your adapter we can help you with.  You should go through the following steps to diagnose and fix your problem.

Drivers - first step
First, update the latest drivers, of course. You can download them here:

Windows XP 32 bit
Windows XP 64 bit
Vista 32 bit
Vista 64 bit

BIOS tuning
If you are sure you are using the latest driver for your graphics card, but your system is still unstable, you should check you BIOS settings. Here are Nvidia's recommendations for GeForce FX 5200:

Assign IRQ to VGA Enabled
VGA palette snooping Disabled
PCI Latency Timer 128
Video BIOS Shadowing Disabled
Video RAM Shadowing Disabled
USWC Options Disabled
PnP O/S Installed Enabled
Video BIOS Cacheable Disabled
Video RAM Cacheable Disabled
AGP Graphics Aperture 64MB (or half of your total system memory)

Other hardware
You could be having system instability issues for several reasons. The "blue screen of death" usually means that you have problems with the driver, not the card itself. But this could be a false positive diagnosis - the video card is constantly working, so whatever happens in your system could be reported as video card problem. For example, you could be having problems with bad memory chips, motherboard hardware, power supply, processor when you get a BSOD telling you its the video card. Here are some diagnosis tips to help you pinpoint the problem:

Broken system memory often causes system freeze and BSOD. Please use the software below to check your memory for bad bytes. It will put your computer's memory under strain and make sure it performs ok. 

http://www.memtest86.com/memtest86-3.5.iso.zip

You could also be experiencing CPU issues. A bad burned transistor somewhere among the million others can be manifested from time to time as system problem.  Download Prime95, a free program that will make your CPU perform huge number of various operations and figure out if it performs ok. 

Bad fan
You have to be sure that your video adapter's cooling is working properly. If you have a fan, take a peak to see if its spinning. It could be full of dust, so it spins slowly, or it has hampered airflow. You will have to remove the card and pick the dust out of the fan. This operation will increase the stability of your system, but it will also decrease the noise that comes out of the fan because it will spin at a lower

Our forum is there for you to help you solve the issues you didn't find in this text. Just make a post and wait for an answer.