Yes if you buy a better video card you will no doubt get a better picture. But as was noted above, no point spending money on a 5 year old computer if you plan on replacing it in the near future.

ok I can answer some of them. so you have a gig in your pc as 2x512 so to go up another gig you would have to change to 2x1gig sticks unless you happen to have 4 slots with 2 still empty. you can do a 1 gig stick and a 512 stick but it is better to have them matched. Now to know what your pc can take I would run belarc advisor, it will tell you exactly how many slots you have how much it can take and what type of memory you need. I will give you the link for that. I always say the best thing to upgrade first is the RAM often times once you have upped the ram you will find a lot of things that were giving you problems work better and video can be one of those. That is no guarantee though. But it sure can not hurt anything. I usually get my Ram from newegg.com they have very good prices, I just paid $18 for a 1 gig stick for one of my pcs. I got Kingston. For the video cards I will let some one else that knows more about those answer you. But why did the one you got not work what was the problem? Here is a link that might be useful: free belarc

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.

I have a video capture card in my computer. Mine is a TV tuner card. You need a fast computer, and a large fast hard drive. For home movies that you want to keep, I STRONGLY suggest you get this done professionally. It's not as easy as hooking up a VCR to the computer and just start recording. There are problems to overcome. Dropped frames and out-of-sync audio are the two biggest. And if you are copying VHS tapes to DVD don't expect DVD quality. The quality is only as good as the input. If you input VHS quality in, you get VHS quality out, or worse. If you have a bunch of movies that you bought on VHS before DVD became popular and you are thinking of transferring these to DVD then forget it. Waste of time. Easier to just get a subscription to NetFlix and rent the DVD and copy it. Some people report great results with video capture devices. For me it has been a mixed bag of results. Hope this helps some. Pooh Bear