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[Dilbert]

My GF has my old PC, and I'm 99% sure the video card just died. (Booted fine on Thursday, failed consistently ever since. When it comes up, the display is at the wrong resolution, is garbled beyond recognition into multiple columns -- sort of -- but you can see normal screen stuff in the background, so I'm pretty sure the rest of the PC is fine. Booting into safe mode makes no difference, so I don't think it's a driver problem.)

The machine is a Compaq OEM from a couple of years ago: Athlon 1.4 GHz (non-XP), GeForce 2 GTS, unknown motherboard, unknown power supply. (Didn't have time to investigate earlier...) Do you think that a GeForce MX 4000 would drop in without incident? It's the cheapest video card that I can find readily, and I'd like to fix it this afternoon since I'll be gone all week.

Thanks for your advice...

 

[Crazymoogle]

1. Try reseating the card first. That means unplugging the vga cable, unscrewing the single screw holding the card in place, taking it out, and then putting it back in. As absurd as it sounds, it really does work sometimes.

2. Otherwise, yeah, the MX will probably work. It would be a good idea to wipe out your old video drivers beforehand, though. It's really difficult to diagnose a display problem as being the result of the motherboard, and it's the worst case scenario, so while we can't rule it out, it's not terribly likely either.

It looks like the MX4000 supports AGP2x, so you're probably voltage compatible too.

 

[fart]

does sound like the card is dead. open up the case. confirm that the video is not integrated (there is either an agp or pci video board), and then determine with it's an AGP or PCI board (pinout is vastly different. you can probably look up the standards.). if it's an agp board, the mx board should drop in. radeon 9200s are pretty cheap too.

 

[Dilbert]

OK, I did the remove/reinsert with the existing card -- no change, problem still manifested. I bought a replacement card (GeForce 4 MX AGP), and to my surprise, THAT didn't fix the problem either.

1) Could I have a bad monitor? This seems fairly unlikely, considering that the "plain text" outputs to it display fine, but you never know.

2) Could the AGP slot itself be bad?

 

[Hitokage]

I'll note that when changing from one nvidia card to another there is absolutely no need to reinstall drivers unless it's a new card unsupported by the version currently installed.

 

[Ecrofirt]

there's no chance that it's the RAM that's fuxx0red, is there?

 

[Crag Dweller]

Does it have on board video that you could revert back to, or did it come with the agp card installed?

 

[Dilbert]

1) Why would system RAM being bad result in display corruption? Wouldn't the computer either a) not boot at all or b) function normally but with a smaller amount of physical RAM available? (I had RAM go bad in a laptop once, and those were the two failure modes.)

2) No onboard video for this motherboard, unfortunately.

 

[automagnus]

Garbled?
Is it in the same place all the time?

 

[BTMash]

You may want to test out the system with a different monitor (I remember going through that sort of stuff with my first system...the monitor was pretty much dead).

Otherwise, it could be the agp slot on the mobo that went out (also happened to an older system...and to my current system's old video card. Why? The power supply was powerful to support all the components in the system, the bios settings were not correct and due to that, the card was getting damaged really badly. Was a good lesson for me...time to assemble the comps myself)