Video card dying?

[guy24s]

For the past 6 months or so, my computer has been shutting down randomly. At first it happened just maybe once a week, sometimes it wouldn't happen for 2-3 weeks. But for the past week it's been happening nearly every day. Sometimes multiple times.

This is what happens exactly:
Suddenly everything freezes up completely for about 1 second.
Then the screen goes blank, but the power light on the computer stays lit and the fans are still spinning.
When I push the power button normally, the computer shuts down. When it has frozen up this way and the screen has gone blank, nothing happens when I push the power button. So the only way is to force shut it down by unplugging the whole machine from the wall.

Today it happened again, but this time the screen just stayed blank for a couple seconds, then it came back on and I had an error message in the corner saying the NVIDIA driver has failed (unfortunately I didn't have time to make a screen dump). All the tabs in Firefox had crashed and had to be restored. If it was just the video card that was acting up why would it affect the web browser, crashing the tabs etc?

PS: All these problems started after I took my old 8 GB RAM stick out and installed a new 16 GB RAM stick called Ballistix Sport Gaming Memory. I don't know if that has anything to do with it or if it's just a coincidence. I can't put the old RAM stick back in because I don't have it anymore. And I don't have any spares either.

Does it sound like my problem is the video card? According to how I explained the symptoms of how it happens.
I am using the 64-bit version of Windows 7 if that matters.

[aedipuss]

sounds more like a ram problem. did you go into the bios and reset it for the new ram? proper voltage and latency? even if you did i'd run a complete ram test. crucial has a 5 year warranty.

[guy24s]

sounds more like a ram problem. did you go into the bios and reset it for the new ram? proper voltage and latency? even if you did i'd run a complete ram test. crucial has a 5 year warranty.

Thanks for replying. No I didn't do any of that as far as I can recall. I really don't know much about RAM, I just upgraded because I kept running out of memory in programs like Photoshop. Would you mind telling me how to properly reset the BIOS for the new RAM?
I also realized it's two 8 Gb sticks and not one 16 Gb like I originally said. The packaging for the RAM sticks I installed says 16GB KIT - 2X8GB - DDR3 - 1600 1.5V.

[aedipuss]

boot into your computers bios. could be rapidly pressing f2, f10, esc, del, or tab at boot up. starting with a bios "reset to defaults" first isn't a bad idea. every mainboard is different but find the ram settings page/pages. match the specs of the new ram to the mainboard settings. save/reboot.

[guy24s]

boot into your computers bios. could be rapidly pressing f2, f10, esc, del, or tab at boot up. starting with a bios "reset to defaults" first isn't a bad idea. every mainboard is different but find the ram settings page/pages. match the specs of the new ram to the mainboard settings. save/reboot.

I thought it would be more difficult than that, even I could have figured that out.
Anyway thanks I'll try it and see if that fixes the problem.