OK here's my exact hardware setup.
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon x1900xt 512MB Ram
System Memory: 512 DDR PC3200 @ 400MHZ Kingston
CPU: AMD64bit socket 754 core "Newcastle" @ 2.1GHZ
Storage: I have a 20 and 40 gig Seagate hdds. An 80 gig Western Digital hdd and another 80 gig WD that is SATA. My 40 gig is partitioned with XP installed on the primary and no other os is installed.
OS: WinXP Pro, all available updates incl. SP2 up to this point in time along with .net framework 2.0
Everything I've done that led me to this problem:
When I reformatted and installed XP this past time, I decided to give Omega Drivers' ATI driver a try.
Seemed to work ok, but then I wanted to watch a video on my tv-out and it wouldn't do anything. I tried going thru the windows menu and thru the Omega Driver utility, and it wouldn't extend or clone my desktop. So I decided to uninstall Omega and go with the official drivers.
However, something is messed up because now when I boot into windows normally, my monitor goes into power save mode and shaking the mouse or tapping keys on the keyboard will not get it to turn back on. I am able to boot into safemode with networking, and the monitor stays on. Under the menu in windows, I don't have power save options enabled. I don't think my card is fried, it doesn't look like there's any phsyical damage and if it was I'd assume it wouldn't work at all. I have a psu that's around 700 watts, way more power than I could ever need with my current hardware setup so there shouldn't any sort of weird issue with not having enough power.
At first I thought maybe having the Omega Drivers previously installed had left something behind and had junked things up. Therefore I scoured the registry for entries relating to ATI and Omega and removed everything I could find. Then I used Ccleaner to clean up erroneous entries in the registry. Then I reinstalled ATI drivers. That didn't work so I went and reinstalled XP again so I'd have a fresh start and installed the official ATI software and still had problems.
My friend has told me that video cards have their own bios just like the motherboard/mainboard does.
Could it be possibly some oddball bug in the bios has finally surfaced somehow? How would I go about flashing bios for a video card? I've flashed my motherboard bios a while ago so I'm familiar with the process, so I'm going to assume it works the same for video cards? In case somehow an error happens during the flashing, am I able to restore the original BIOS settings on the card like on my motherboard, or will it basically turn into a pricey paperweight? Thanks in advance to anyone that can help me out.
