I was working with Adobe Photoshop, just some regular work, when I came to edit a PSD file and change the text of some layer, when all of a sudden the PC froze. No mouse, screen is frozen, keyboard strokes aren't getting me anything, no Task Manager, nada.

So I rebooted my PC, and then something quite terrifying appeared before my eyes. It was not the Checkdisk utility that was launched, that made me terrified (by the way, that reboot damaged the partition table of an external HDD that was connected at the time to my PC, but that's another story). It was the screen itself. Please have a look.

So after Checkdisk finished and Windows loaded, I noticed that the resolution was not right. Instead of 1440x900 which I had set, it was 1280x1024. When I went to change it back, I had no option to change back to my old resolution, and has only 3 other general resolution properties, as if my Video Card (GeForce 8800 GTS btw) was not recognized. And what do you know, in the Device Manager it appeared with an exclamation mark. Inside the hardware, it said this: Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43) Uninstalling the drivers, downloading the newest drivers from NVIDIA and installing them did not work. It always comes back to this. So, do you have any advice before I go out and buy a new graphics card? I thought this was the only option left, but maybe the experts at Super User can help me out.

By the way, the dotted screen appears after every reboot, and I see the dots when the ASUS Motherboard screen shows up at boot.

Thanks in advance.