New Video Card

[AngelicKnight]

I feel your pain. I'm having he same problem with a firewire card and various sound cards on this machine. Stick 'em in the PCI slot, producer says Windows will detect the hardware and add it accordingly, then -- NOTHING! I'm quite bewildered myself. Grr...

And, I have one up on you on cases. I had a couple of old machines donated to me, and they have plenty of good parts in them, only -- I can't get to them! The cases are horribly built, as screws necessar to remove the various drives are positioned so that no screwdriver can reach them without having gymnastic capabilities. The case is built so you can't reach anything to remove it.

[MilitantEidolon]

So, you are having problems with installing a new graphics card over your already integrated graphics card? Correct?

Well lets see -

Do you have a gaphics card slot or are you trying to hook it into a wrong port? (I am not trying to make you sound stupid but sometimes the easiest things are the answers. I have seen others do this.) I just know that sometimes integrated boards don't have room for extra graphics card.

Have you loaded any other internal hardware onto this computer? If so was the install easy?

You can't boot to your BIOS?

Is your keyboard USB? If you keyboard is USB you may not be able to use it until you boot into an OS. If your keyboard is swap it with one with a serial port and try again.

- MilitantEidolon

[nihil]

Hi Keezel,

When you say "the old one" are you saying that you already have a replacement (that works) for the onboard video chipset. If so what does it plug into, a short brown slot, or one of the longer (white) PCI slots?

You do realise that Compaq were taken over by HP, so support is not going to be more than marginal. Anyways, the big boys don't like it when you change components and operating systems. And they will be as interested in a dual boot into Windows and *nix as Saddam Hussein is in human rights.

Is this an old ex-corporate machine, by the way? It may have a custom BIOS.............anyway, the big manufacturers mess with the BIOS to cut their support costs. The standard BIOS access for Compaq is F10, so there is something weird about your machine for a start. That could be this dual boot manager?

It's a Compaq Presario with an Intel Pentium 4 2 GHz processor.

Well that machine should certainly have an AGP slot IMHO, it is relatively modern. Even DELL PIIIs have AGP slots That's the short brown one, usually with a locking mechanism at one end.

I would suggest changing the BIOS setting to "onboard/VGA" and see what happens. Try it with the monitor attached to the new video card.............I have an old Digital Venturis that I put a PCI video card into.........it will use that or the onboard one, depending on which outlet I attach it to on bootup.

just a few thoughts