Ok, I think my subject on this is right. I have a Compaq N610c laptop, 2ghz, 512, 40g, radeon 7000. I went to boot it up today, and the screen was black. I decided to restart, cause it usually fixes alot of things, and it did the same thing. I decided to use microsoft's good ole safe mode. I got into windows just fine, but when i wanted to look at my video settings, I found that my Adapter type (display properties>settings>advanced>adapter tab, had a resource conflict. I am quite computer savvy (school district tech 2 + years) but i have to say i've never done anything with resources. I tried to restart again, this time with network support to download drivers, but the bootup sequence would not make it past the agp drivers. Now that i can't get into the os at all I am really lost. Anyone have any ideas? I really need help.

What O/S ? If XP...do you have any restore points, have you made any major changes recently (Drivers/Software?)

winxp pro, all updates. No major hardware or software changes recently. The laptop was hooked up to a 21in Gateway Vivitron monitor. I had to unplug it, and move it into the living room to work on it, and thats when it happened. I tried restore points already in safe mode. It said restore is disabled in safe mode, and to relogin into normal and activate it.

Temporarily disable ACPI in device manager by replacing it with "Standard PC"

While I don't recommend using Standard PC for a laptop (poor power management), I'm pretty confident it will allow you to use your computer again.

How to do it?

Start / Control Panel / System / Hardware / Device Manager

Expand "Computer" and right click on on ACPI (Advanced Configuration blah blah..). Choose "Update Driver", select the manual option. And lastly, choose the "Don't search" option.

You should be presented with two choices... ACPI and Standard PC. The goal is change your power management layer to Standard PC which gives you "old-fashioned" IRQ steering. So select Standard PC and click next.

You will need to reboot Windows and this should work... But no guarantees can be made. Also, this can render some computers / configurations unbootable, although this is a rare occurence. Be prepared to follow these intructions just in case the worst happens: http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthrea...&threadid=8356

Once you get your computer usable, you should change Windows back to ACPI. It will probably work OK again. Such are the splendors of Windows...

And this is just a general resource conflict solution... Not anything specific for your video problem. There may be better ways to go about solving your conflicting VGA adapter.

Ok, just one problem. That would work if i could get into windows. But now since i followed your other link it worked out just fine. I thank you for the help.

Is there a function keystroke (FN + F7 maybe?) to change display outputs?