My friend has an old Compaq Presario with a defective 15-pin connector and I’m having difficulties in installing a new Graphics card on his pc. History : After every boot on an XP-Home SP1 Presario, display works fine for a few seconds, then the screen is filled with small gray and white rectangular cells. Screen is okay because it works properly on another pc. I bought an ATI Radeon 9250 PCI card, figuring that the 15-pin VGA connector on the original motherboard was defective. Once the card was put into the pci slot, the pc would not boot. I inserted the card at home on my own pc and found that in the BIOS of my Asus P4P800 MB, you have to choose which of AGP or PCI is primary. I selected PCI and got the boot started. However, at one point in time the screen froze on the Windows logo but I noticed that the boot appeared to have completed successfully (I heard the chimes from Windows). Questions : 1. I imagine that the drivers for the 9250 graphics card should be installed while running under my current graphics card. Maybe I should also uninstall that card in the Device Manager. Then, I should change the primary from AGP to PCI in the BIOS and boot using the 9250 card. Is that how to get things running properly? 2. If that’s the way to go about it, how do I operate on the Presario where I am “blind”? How could I install the 9250 drivers if that’s where the hang-up is? How could I uninstall the VGA connector in the Device Manager? Any suggestion is welcome

Hi, Normally you need no drivers to boot or get into BIOS SETUP. The driver for that is built into the BIOS. Any good card should work there. BIOS setting for AGA or PCI would make no difference. Sounds like you have some other problem. Good Luck, Jim

"...the screen is filled with small gray and white rectangular cells." The presario's onboard video is fried. No matter what the settings in the bios are for the video, all video starts up in a basic VGA mode. With the 9250 installed, and the monitor connected to it, you will have video in the first part of the boot and can set it's bios to initialize PCI first, and you should then be able to get a basic but normal display in Windows if you boot into Safe mode, or Enable VGA mode. If the the 9250 is detected while booting, and you are prompted to install drivers, Cancel that. You then un-install the drivers and applications for the onboard video in Add/Remove Programs if there are any entries there, and it's also a good idea to go into Device Manager and Disable the onboard video under Display Adapters (un-installing it will not help - it will come back next boot). Reboot normally, and you should have basic video booting Windows, the 9250 will be detected, and you will be prompted to install drivers - if it wants to install a basic PCI display adapter let it - if not, Cancel, and let it go to the desktop, and in any case, use the CD that came with the card to install it's drivers and applications. If the 9250 is not detected while booting this time, running the install from the CD should work anyway, and it should the yellow ! marked unknown video entry in Device Manager automatically. I'm assuming the onboard video was not ATI - if it was the procedire may need to be a lot more complicated.

Jim, I had the same problem on my own pc as on the Presario when inserting the 9250 card alongside my current ASUS 9600 RADEON. When I set pci as primary in the BIOS, the pc booted alright up to a point. I didn't investigate further like booting into safe mode. I'll follow tubesandwires' approach and report back on Tuesday.

Hi again Z, When you add another video card all bets are off. Some times you get non-compatiblity problems with any hardware or software. Programers are only human. They can not anticipate all problems and/or find ways to "Program around them". JIm

I got the screen to work but I don’t know why. I started by going into the BIOS where I found 2 items which were close to what I wanted to do : I enabled VGA PCI snoop and disabled Onboard VGA monochrome. When I inserted the 9250 pci card, the pc would not boot. I tried different combinations of the above enable/disables. No soap. I tried different pci slots. Same thing. The Presario MB appears to be allergic to the card. I then removed the card, plugged the screen into the 15-pin connector and reset the BIOS settings to their original status. I booted in Safe Mode and was successful all the way through (no problem with the screen). In the Display item of the Control Panel, I selected a resolution of 640x480 pixels and colours at 16 bits. I pressed Apply. When I rebooted normally, the whole process was successful. I had a peak at the Display item and was surprised to see that the figures were 1024x768 and 32 bits respectively! Any explanations?

Some settings in your bios setup were wrong. When you reloaded the default settings it cured whatever settings were improper.