You may want to change a video card for a number of reasons, one of the biggest being a lack of color depth or resolution. If you have a 15" monitor, you only need to be able to use 800x600 at 24 or 32 bit color. A 2MB card can even give your this resolution. Many people now are buying 3D Graphic Accelerators. There are 3 basic buses for video cards still in use, the Vesa Local Bus (VL-BUS), PCI bus and AGP bus. The AGP bus is typically contained on Pentium II or Super Socket 7 motherboards. If you have a Pentium or better, you can use a PCI video card. The VL-Bus is a slow video bus contained on 486s and lower. Make sure you pick out the right card for your bus.

To install a PCI or AGP, simply slide the video card into the PCI or AGP slot, and put the screw to hold the card. If you have any MPEG decoder or TV-Tuner cards, you need to hook up the VGA-Pass through cable. Typically, there are no jumpers on video cards unlike most other computer hardware.

There is not much configuring to do with software. If you have Windows '95 or better, Windows should auto-detect the card. Most likely it will prompt you to insert the driver disk that came with the card. If you have Windows 3.1 most likely you have to run an install program that came with the card. You should also re-install Microsoft DirectX if you have any games that use it.

Video card technology isn't very interesting. A video card contains VRAM of some sort, and a video processor. Some of the newer video cards contain 3d video processors, which contain instructions on how to draw good 3d looking graphics. The graphic processor converts the digital data of the computer into analog data which the monitor can use. Video graphic speed all depends on what type of a bus you install the card into. AGP is currently the fastest video bus. AGP is meant to run at the speed of the processor. It is also fast, because it is a video only bus, whereas the PCI is not, and VL-Bus is too slow.