i turn on my computer and everything turns on except i dont get the picture in the monitor. i tried 3 monitors that work and none of them work on the computer. how can i figure out if my video card doesnt work?

What is your system? Specs? Is it brand new? Does the PC beep at all?

its a 2000 gateway e 3400 and it does not beep when i turn it on

I had a problem like that, but it was because the ram had came out of the slots. Although mine beeped twice at me when the ram comes out. I would still check to see if everything is in its place.

If there isnt a beep then it could be your motherboard, i have exactly the same problem with my main computer (this is my brothers who thinks that it is a motherboard problem seeing that the graphics card doesnt beep anyway)

I just had the same problem the other day. I had just bought a brand new PIII 1000MHz for my machine. Before I even go to put it in the video failed. I found out it was a combo of a failing video board and mixed types of ram. All of the Ram was PC 100 but because I have yet to upgrade to a gig of PC 133 I had (2) 256 meg PC100 toshibas and (2) 128 meg Generic Brand PC100s for a total of 768 megs. My motherboard didn't like it. So I was lucky only to escape with a failed video board. By the my video card was an Nvidia GeForce Prophet II 3D and I have an ASUS CUV4X-E motherboard.

Have you plugged in some speakers in the board's audio jack if it has it? Because some motherboards give audio messages when something fails. I had that problem with my recently built pc.