I bought a GeForce FX5200 card about a year ago for gaming. I had to stick with PCI due to my motherboard and heard this card was good. Initially I got about 35+ FPS with medium visual quality settings. Now I get about 12 FPS at the lowest settings. What could be the cause of this? Should I buy a new video card?

I bought a GeForce FX5200 card about a year ago for gaming. I had to stick with PCI due to my motherboard and heard this card was good. Initially I got about 35+ FPS with medium visual quality settings. Now I get about 12 FPS at the lowest settings. What could be the cause of this? Should I buy a new video card?
If your motherboard only takes a PCI videocard I think you are well past due for a new system. I know you probably don't want to spend the money on a new system but it is going to be much cheaper to do it now than to keep upgrading the system part by part. I sold computers for five years for a IT company, it was so frustrating to see people pour money into their out of date systems and then just continually keep coming back because it was still slow or they just weren't happy. Just my opinion though.

I'm a junior in high school, and I intend to buy a laptop for my senior year and going into college. I can't just buy a whole new desktop right now. I'm just wondering if there is rationality for why my video card is slowing down.

Sounds like a case of Windoze Cludge.
This is windoze filling up with crud over time and slowing down noticeably.

You have a few options that may help:

When was the last time you did some serious system maintenance on your machine ?
Here's my usual C&P for cases like this:


When was the last time you did some serious maintenance on your system ?

System maintenance includes:
Defrag
FULL patching
Virus scanning
Spyware scanning
removal of rubish files

Defrag is an inbuilt function in XP.
Open My Computer > Right click C: > Tools Tab and its there.

To make sure everything is running fine run both anti virus and anti spyware apps in normal AND safe modes. (make sure that they are updated first ! ;)) (AVG (http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1) is good and free AV)
(A couple of good removal tools are Spybot (http://www.safer-networking.org/) and Adaware (http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/))

ALso an on line virus and spyware scanner is Trend Housecall (http://housecall.trendmicro.com/)

Just a note: actively running two AV's on one machine can cause problems.
So if you are thinking about it make sure your current one is disabled first.
Same thing applies to online scanners as well.

Removal of junk files is easy with CCleaner (http://www.ccleaner.com) a free app that does exactly what

If all this fails then a repair install may be in order:

Here's (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/tips/doug92.mspx) the official Micro$oft way of doing it,
and Here's (http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=138) one with screen shots.

Basically this installs windows over the top of your current setup.
So you don't loose any information you already have.

This lot should resolve your issue.

Failing that and probably the best course of action would be a COMPLETE rebuild from FULL format.

Formatting my hard-drive might solve the issue? With a little searching I think I can find all the install disks and components that go along with my "System Restore" feature on my computer. Would you suggest that to possibly enhance my video card's efficiency?

It will reset your machine to factory settings, so NO cludge.
Will help a great deal.

I have personally never had a video card go bad. Surely it's possible, I would think... but, for example, my server, for at least a year, has had this $5 low-profile generic Geforce 4 card. It's not even a low profile case, but for that price, I decided I'd just bend back the little tab. :)

Reinstalling should solve it.

But if you want to make sure, I recommend downloading a linux livedisk and booting off that. That way, you can see what your card would be doing without the old clogged up Windoze.

I think for checking graphics, either the Knoppix Games disk or the PCLinuxOS SuperGamer (If you have NVidea chipset, geforce 4 or later) would give you a good idea of what to expect, although they ARE both DVD images.