Wow I posted and retired for the night and the responses. Found it was the graphics card back on the motherboard now. Ahh! XP I am home.
The Notepad came with Vista. Go to Win 7 I am thinking of going back to the future and load XP on it.

Yeah! Reformat. Anyone had a colonoscopy. That's a personal reformat. Anyway you will all be most glad to know I am back and ready to annoy the pants off you.

To Viv I hear what you say but I agree that reformatting should be done once a year. Do backups make an image copy and start fresh. This is a pain in the butt then you know who your real Friends/Programs really are.

Doing an image backup as I type. I am 30% full on the Terabyte backup drive. I agree with you Jo I should not try new things like your Hubby but where would that discovery of something new come from . Sorry I am in his corner. Where is your adventurous spirit. Adventure before Dementure

Ahh! twas the Graphics card not the Hard Drive. The fan failed, temperature rose, instructions were given to abort and shutdown. Now screen connected to motherboard. It is a good card too. A FX5500-8x. I will have to see if I can find a fan to repair it. My computer is like my car. Less and less original parts day by day. Where do you find a computer wreckers these days.

Glad to hear all is not lost, Prism!
As for reformatting, I've never done it, not sure i want to do it , but will check it out. Can't be much worse than all the security scans, various cleaning operations and the defragging that gets done Every Single Friggin' Day to ward off viruses and keep this machine running at the speed of molasses

I will have to Google reformatting to see what's involved – must be fun since Scott does it so often!

Actually it is a bit like self dentistry. You open your mouth in front of a mirror. Get a good grip with a trusty pair of pliers and pull. Ahh! almost forgot the important part have a good swig of your favourite poison first.

Actually now this is the real drum. Get a new Hard Drive often found by the side of the road these days. Mount in a HD case and connect (USB), format and use a XLM image to restore to that drive(Insurance). Give your drive the business and start with a new Op Sys. install. reinstall what you need. If things go pear shape just remove the drive and replace it with your new best friend. Then wonder why you bothered in the first place. OR. Go and buy a new computer you know you deserve it.

Actually I have to have a word with my son. He recently upgraded his graphics card and gave me his old one which I thought would give me an extra bit of speed. It was a bit noisy but it was a slight improvement. I am not a gamer. The noise was the fan failing, So fan failed, heat rose etc etc etc.

The good news, the Notepad is back in the cupboard, It was a present from a client and has had about 10 hours use. Nothing like my 1980's clunker with the new bits.
Seriously now

Formatting is a serious business make sure you have a good verified image back up, a Boot CD with the right tools on and consider all other alternatives like defrag, delete unwanted data check the programs that start with Windows. CCleaner is the tool to start with.

And, think twice about it.

Paintbrush, just a thought did you get a restore disc with your pc / laptop

Or more to the point did it give you the option to create one when you first bought it

I ran my sons one when he got a virus, machine was as good as new afterwards.

Prism's colonoscopy metaphor is spot on! I've had two already and am up for renewal next year. But that's probably more than you needed to know ....

Can't guess how many times I have reformatted hard drives, moved and re-sized partitions, set up multi-OS boots etc. Back in the Win 3.0 through Win 98 days, I would annually back up all of my data, reformat and reload the OS and apps as a matter of routine, whether I needed to or not .... because of course I needed to. I rushed madly to get it done during my kids' Christmas vacations, when they didn't require the computers for school.

XP was much better. Once it had settled down in service pack 2, I found reformat / reload unnecessary until one kid or another would inevitably snag from the Web some deep-tentacled, viral Trojan.

These days, it's cheap to buy a second disk to hold app data and all of those precious old photographs. At the very least, it's worth putting data in a partition separate from Windows and applications.

I grabbed the Tomato USB firmware (from http://tomatousb.org/) and burned it into an ASUS RT-N16 router. This Linux-based gadget not only handles my wired & wireless Internet access and supports my VOIP telephone gadget, but also supports two terabyte drives down in the basement as network-attached storage (NAS).

Backup apps on my networked PCs "push" filesystem changes to the NAS volumes. I back up WIN XP-Pro 64, Win 7 Starter Edition, Win 7-Pro 64 and Ubuntu 12.04 machines in this way. (Pleased to say that I skipped Vista.)

This totally saved my bacon last summer, when I lost a drive on my development PC. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

If that weren't enough, I've configured the NAS drives to spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity. In my cool, dehumidified basement, those drives should last for many years.

Off topic but on my mind: I sure hope that my CoffeeCup stuff works with Windows 8. I am not looking forward to that transition.

Nor do I look forward to Microsoft's dropping XP support next spring.

These are the root canals and colonoscopies of life with computers.

I have many copies of XP, Who cares if MS gives up on it as long as it runs my favourites. Somewhere I have a boot disk with a Linux system on that I can revert to. But I think I mentioned that Computers are put out on the kerb side these days on garbage night. They all seem to come with 80gig 5200 rpm drives of different flavours. So just mount one in a HD box reformat and load an image to it. Spare at your finger tips. Takes longer to find a cross blade than fitting it. To think that once a hard drive was an holy grail. how things change. I have over 300 VHS tapes in a cupboard, 60 reels of super 8 video film, dozens of Vinyl records even a couple of 1/4" single side, his masters voice ones. cassettes, Old floppies and 35mm transparencies trying to throw them out is like re arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I like my stuff. I even have the original ZX80 Sinclaire single board computer with 1 kb of ram. I suppose I am a horder. I even have the complete works of Shakespeare, James Cooks voyages and 1000's of books, but my wife has more. We did have a double garage but it is now a library. My wife has a computer and a laptop and I have 3 computers and a notepad one with a very fast A to D capture system. Time is the enemy. The day I forget the syntax of my programming languages will the time to pull the plug

I care if MS gives up on XP because that means no more security fixes, so I must migrate to Win 7 for online access. It's not that big a deal, just yet another format & reload cycle. It's a needless one, however.

I dread Win 8, since its UEFI secure-boot nonsense (https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/588498:uefi-secure-boot-big-hassle-questionable-benefit) probably will require my purchasing a new motherboard. What a disgusting prospect.

It's unlikely that you are a horder, Prism. You might be a hoarder, but unless you are friends with Genghis Khan, you are no horder. (Yes, I am joking and maybe ought to employ an emoticon to indicate that, but I dislike emoticons.)

Graphics card fixed, The fan came apart, I oiled it, used the old trick of squashing the bearings and all is ok. I know they are quite cheap but why throw it away when a bit of impact maintenance fixes it up.

You never know I may want to play a game, one day, maybe, you never know, Nah! probably not.