I am on a Dell Dimension 2350 pent 4 1.8gh and i just bought a new video card to install. i currently have onboard graphics and was told that i should disable them before installing the new vid card. i was also told that pressing the delete key when first seeing the Dell sign would get me into BIOS. I tried that many times and it didnt work. the only thing i can get into is when i press the F10 key, this brings me to a testing type thing and im not sure if its what i want...please help

press f2 on startup

Here is a link to the Dell Dimension Bios Forum. The first post is an FAQ that is good reading. It claims that F2 is the key you need. http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board?board.id=dim_bios&page=3 It may well not be necessary to disable the on board bios. I would try just installing the card and plugging the monitor into it and seeing if it works. If that doesn't work, you have two avenues. One is to disable the on board graphics, which you would do by hunting around within the bios menus. A search of that Dell forum might point you the way. But it is also possible that there is no way to disable the on board graphics. If that is true, there will certainly be a way to tell the bios which display type to use as the main one - pci or agp. On board graphics are always agp. Your card may be agp or pci. The difference is in the number of pins on the card - the pin area is a little wider on agp than on pci, and your pc will have several pci slots but 1 or 0 agp slots.

i am not sure if you either have to disable on board video through bios or on board jumper settings please check your manual

One more point - I suggest you download 3dmark2001 from madonion.com, which is an excellent video benchmarking program. It is very possible that your on board video will be as fast or faster than your add on video card, if your add on card is pci. pci video cards are constrained by the pci bus and tend not to perform too well.

How do you get in to BIOS ? Bios Manufacturer Key Command(s) ALR Advanced Logic Research, Inc. ® PC / PCI F2 ALR PC non / PCI CTRL+ALT+ESC AMD® (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.) BIOS F1 AMI (American Megatrends, Inc.) BIOS DEL Award™ BIOS CTRL+ALT+ESC Award BIOS DEL DTK® (Datatech Enterprises Co.) BIOS ESC Phoenix™ BIOS CTRL+ALT+ESC Phoenix BIOS CTRL+ALT+S Phoenix BIOS CTRL+ALT+INS Computer Key Command(s) Acer® F1, F2, CTRL+ALT+ESC AST® CTRL+ALT+ESC, CTRL+ALT+DEL Compaq® 8700 F10 CompUSA® DEL Cybermax® ESC Dell® 400 F3 Dell 400 F1 Dell Dimension® F2 or DEL Dell Inspiron® F2 Dell Latitude Fn+F1 (while booted) Dell Latitude F2 (on boot) Dell Optiplex DEL Dell Optiplex F2 Dell Precision™ F2 eMachine™ DEL Gateway® 2000 1440 F1 Gateway 2000 Solo™ F2 HP® (Hewlett-Packard) F1, F2 IBM® F1 IBM E-pro Laptop F2 IBM PS/2® CTRL+ALT+INS after CTRL+ALT+DEL IBM Thinkpad® (newer) Windows: Programs-Thinkpad CFG. Intel® Tangent DEL Micron™ F1, F2, or DEL Packard Bell® F1, F2, Del Sony® VIAO F2 Sony VIAO F3 Tiger DEL Toshiba® 335 CDS ESC Toshiba Protege ESC Toshiba Satellite 205 CDS F1 Toshiba Tecra F1 or ESC

I should have added... F10 allows you to get into SAFE MODE (& other modes). Safe Mode is where the PC boots up with the minimum of drivers and programs running. It's just to get the PC limping into life to do diagnostics if you can't start the machine normally.