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As well as flickering wildly and disappearing for increasingly longer periods, the image is slowly fading away, making the preparation of this column an ever more difficult task. A quick check with another monitor proves it's not the screen so that means my good old ASUS 3400TNT AGP card has passed its "best by" date.

If anyone out there has one of these video cards they can donate I'd really like to hear from you because, since this box is actually a P400 running Windows 98 (yeah, honest!), I really don't fancy my chances on successfully installing a more modern card and its drivers -- although that may ultimately be my only option. However, all the new cards I've looked at seem to be ultra-fast, stacked with RAM and worth an arm and a leg (I only have a finger's worth of $ spare right now :-)

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If it weren't for the fact that this monitor makes awful noises if the refresh rate is set to less than 72Hz and I really need 1280x1024 pixel resolution, I'd be tempted to scavenge the PCI-based video board from another dead PC that's sitting on the floor here.

If this thing dies completely it'll really pee me off, since even finding the time to go through the laborious task of uninstalling and reinstalling something as critical and sensitive as a set of video drivers under Windows will be something of a luxury.

So how do others get on when their favourite (or only) old PC decides to pack a sad and die, or at least take a hit to the body?

I've noticed a growing number of cards and peripherals these days seem only to come with drivers for Win2K or XP. If you're *really* lucky, they might come with drivers for Win98SE -- but I'm just running plain old Win98 (no SE).

For the sake of a basic video card or some other elementary component, it seems that many folks are forced to throw away otherwise perfectly good PCs that, while old and slow, are perfectly adequate for WP, email and basic web-browsing.

Of course I looked at the option of buying an "upgrade box" but that's a bit of a non-starter right now too.

Although such units come without a keyboard, monitor, floppy drive or other bits you can re-use from your old machine, they're still quite highly spec'd (512MB RAM, 80GB HD) compared to my old 256MB, P400 with 20GB HD and are just a little beyond the monthly budget right now.

Another reason for keeping this box alive is that over the years I've accumulated a raft of software (legal I might add) that has all been laboriously installed and configured. To move everything to a new box would involve many, many hours of hunting down the original disks (half my possessions are still in a mountain of cardboard boxes) then reinstalling everything. Such a move also involves actually finding the passwords associated with many automated processes such as the login for my mailbox, FTP servers and a raft of other stuff that one tends to rely on the computer remembering.

The way Windows is structured, you can't just pull the boot HD out of a PC built in 1999 and throw it into one built in 2005 -- Bloody Microsoft!

So, if anyone can offer a little help, maybe it's not just me but also the many other people who are forced to throw out their old faithful PC when it starts faltering who will be saved.

I've posted this column tonight (just in case the video card really spits the dummy overnight) and will update the headline links on Tuesday morning (the Video-Card Gods willing).

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