my new (to me) compo is an IBM thinkpad,general opinion is the graphics card is toast as i have no red colours showing only blue and green,i have a spare DELL,will the card from that fit?
also,my printer is a HP deskjet f390,works fine on my old compo but not with the new one,i have deleted the prog and re-installed prog/drivers/cd etc and it still dont work,there is no icon showing on the screen for normal print but the one for printing photo,s shows but wont work....any ideas peeps?

Much more likely to be a break in the cable to the monitor.

Which model Thinkpad?

I've a T23 which is only good for parts...

cant see a model number,says think centre on the front?
i have tried a new cable and still the same,old compo is fine so i recon it,s in the compo

Ahh, Think Centre's a desktop machine, Thinkpad is a Lappy....

You could easily try the Dell card, providing you have the driver disk, or can find the correct driver on the dell site.

cheers ill have a go

If the computers are both laptops (the ThinkPad is IBM's name for a laptop) then there is no graphics card to remove I'm afraid - They're all intergrated into the main circuit board and once they fail it's normally write off time.

Having said that Martyn is right - A break in the cable feeding the screen is more common. Again an internal part but possible to replace.

If it is a laptop - try connecting a monitor to the port on the back. If it's fine the internal graphics card (well chipset to be precise) is fine - it's one of the cables at fault. If monitor is as bad as the internal screen - then yes. It's toast!