Bernie you can indeed change the boot order in the BIOS, remember to press F10 when you exit to save the settings. After you can return to the BIOS and reset it to the original drive if you wish. Your video card is likely built into the motherboard, very few mass produced computers have separate video cards now. If you have access to a monitor there should be a spot to connect it to the computer to verify that the video card is working or not. You might Google 'video card stability test' and select a program to download and test the card, there are plenty of them out there. You mention that the problem computer is old. Perhaps the vents and fan are bunged up with dust bunnies creating a heat issue? Have you tried clearing this out? If you made note of the hard drive you could visit the manufacturers site and run some tests on it perhaps.

When snidely asks "What's the format?" that means what are the letters of the file extension.

If I am doing something like .. downloading a torrent (Which I would Never, Ever do) .. and I don't have any browser windows open and shut my monitor off .. will my video card stop running? No probably not, the video card expects it's signal to reach the monitor. It has no way to understand you turned the monitor off. On my Windows 7 home build with a Gigabyte motherboard sleep mode meant everything stopped running and all open things were saved to the memory (RAM), tyhe computer was totally silent. However it has been a troublesome board from the start and I recently rebuilt using a cheaper Biostar board. Now only the hard drives and monitor goes to sleep similar to what other operating systems do in sleep mode. Most store bought computers today have the video built into the motherboard along with all the other peripheries from yesteryear. What do you hope to save, money on power or wear and tear? Just curious here.

That's exactly what you need, although many are no longer "cards" but use a USB port. Currently Pinnacle offers the Dazzle product and Hauppauge has the Live2. There may be older products still on the market as well. They should include software to edit the movie and create a DVD. You might also want to look at eBay or Craigslist for used cards as well. Depending on how many videos you want to convert, it may be easier to pay someone to do it for you.