Some day I had brilliant thought let's go wild sell this old GeForce 2 Ti crap and buy something brand new. Like I thought that I did and bought Gigabyte Radeon 9550 128 Mb/128bit. I got the card plug it in and..none. System didn't boot up and I don't mean that Windows did not want to start I just got blank screen. Monitor didn't respond like it had no signal from the card. I thought "Ok, maybe I've got not enough power". So I plug out all power connectors (from disk, cd-rw, even from floppy). I tried again and still nothing's happening. Then I cleared CMOS and voila! Monitor turned on and system booted up normally. I installed drivers, enjoyed for a while, then turned out my comp. Later I tried to turn on my computer but it's happening again and I mean nothing happens. Resetting BIOS one more time was of no use, didn't work. I turn power on, hear all drives, all fans are working, but nothing happens, monitor still remains blank, I almost forgot I don't know if it's important but I don't hear PC-speaker. Now that's how I recognize when my computer starts up: When I hear sound from PC-speaker it means that eveything is fine and comp will start, when I hear nothing except fans then I know that it won't start. He can "refuse" to start for couple of hours and then suddenly he starts and boot like nothing happened. I don't know what's the problem, maybe my mobo needs to be updated? My mobo is ECS K7VTA3. I checked ATI site and Gigabyte too but I didn't find anything useful. If anyone is able to help I would be really grateful..

Try a few basic steps first,

Check the card is securley in

Check you've plugged your monitor into your graphics card and not any onboard ports.

When teh comp does boot up, check to see if the card is conflicting with anthing else

Find out if the card is compatable with your motheroard

Put the old card back in and update your BIOS and motherboard drivers. Also make sure you removed all of the nVidia drivers. Going from nVidia to ATI drivers can cause alot of problems especially if you didnt remove all of the old video drivers. If you're using Win 98 you may have an IRQ conflict. Whenever I change video card brands I do a clean install of Windows. it saves alot of hassles.

I updated BIOS nut it din't do any improvement. I plugged old card, updated BIOS then plugged Radeon and still the same, monitor remains blank. And if you could explai it to me what's the use of removing Nvidia drivers when my computer doesn't even start? As far as I remember drivers are loaded when Windows starts but here Windows is not starting so removing previous drivers won't change anything. I don't think that drivers are loaded when computer starts,am I wrong? I really appreciate your advice but it's not helpful.. So if you have another option I would really grateful.

Best regards


Imrahil

Again, as Sye said, make sure the card is in the slot securely.

Some video cards have a place to plug in power directly.

If it's an AGP card and you can get into the bios, try setting the agp slot to 4x or 2x.

Disable on board video if you have it.

There is more you can do, but if all else fails RMA you card and try a new one.

Uh...because the drivers can conflict. I don't mean to be rude but before you shoot down someone's idea you should give it a try. Chances are a new card of the same type is only giong to result in the same problems. Get rid of the Nvidia drivers, Check for conflicts (In the device manager, look for a yellow circle with an "!" in it. That means there's a problem), and as mentioned before, if all else fails, backup and do a clean installation of Windows.

-Zach

hey, by the way do you have onboard video??you might want to check the bios when your pc DOES boot to see what your agp slot is running at like 1x or 2x or 4x or 8x??maybe your agp slot is not getting enough power.also you might want to select agp slot in "init display first"option that might be in you bios(i dont know which bios you have,worth a try).

and if nothing works try this-when you first turn your pc on hit reset button exactly after it,it worked on my friends pc when he had a similar problem like this.

try it and tell me if any of this works.. :bounce:

Black screen of death

I hope that you have not done what I did when replacing my NVidia Ge-Force2 with an ATI Radeon 9200SE. I uninstalled the basic Windows XP VGA drivers which are needed even in Safe Mode to give a picture of any sort. That was after reading posts on this forum. In the end I had to reinstall Windows.

If the advice given so far hasn't helped, have a look at my post
Radeon 9200SE -Resource conflict-code 12. The instructions for installing an ATI card need a great deal of improvement.

Also, I found that updating the drivers provided on the CD is not applicable in the same way as with NVidia cards. The latter are fully backward compatible. Not so with ATI cards.

Good luck.