nVidia is good at support even with *newer OS and legacy products, or *at least it is up until Windows 7 64-bit which is where my knowledge of their drivers end at for OS. I haven't had to support Windows 8 yet with nVidia drivers to state that they are good with Win 8. I have tested the series 4,5,6,7,8,9 nVidia products with Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit through the various users I support who try to stretch the life of their video cards and systems, and have upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7.
The 8 Series 8800GT is kind of old, but still enough GPU depending on application. And the 8 series covers the 8400GS and this 8800GT and there is a pretty noticable difference between the two GPUs in performance. But the fact that the user stated the crashes and artifacts, it reminds me of when my XFX 7600GT crapped out on me. But mine was the GPU fan stopped spinning and the GPU roasted. I removed the strand of hair that was holding the fan from moving and it worked again, and the video card then worked ok up until gaming at which it would crash when it warmed up even with fan cooling. So I had to throw it away
It lasted almost 6 years, so I definately got my moneys worth out of that video card. The good thing though is that there are many low cost video cards out there these days that perform better than the older cards, so even if your on a tight budget like myself, you can get by as long as the game etc doesnt require more than the GPU or system can handle. The Core 2 Duo 6600 2.4Ghz is an ok system which for the most part can still run many modern games paired up with a good video card. I upgraded my wife from a 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duo E4300 to this same 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo E6600 when I got one cheap and her HP with ASUS motherboard supported it, and its not a bad Dual-Core CPU. She is also running Windows 7 64-bit and has a 9800GT installed which was my hand me down to her, since I always have the faster hardware..
It plays World of Warcraft 5.2, Aion, as well as a bunch of other online games pretty good. I set her video settings to medium to keep the 60fps vs 30fps of ultra settings. Setting her up with 1024x768 on the 19" flat screen also helped improve performance vs the higher res the display could be set to. Games like WoW have video display properties that can be easily customized for performance too.
The only thing I do have to do for her system is add more RAM at some point. I got the system for free dead with 1GB RAM, I fixed it, replaced Vista with Win 7 64-bit and added 2 x 512MB sticks and so she has 2GB RAM, but its a stick mixture 1 x 1GB & 2 x 512MB, so 3 of 4 RAM banks are stuffed and its running single-channel when it supports dual channel. At some point I will come across a free or cheap upgrade for her to get her to 4GB maybe. She is running 667Mhz DDR2.
