i'm visiting my parents for the week and discovered that they finally "upgraded" their very ancient PC to a fairly respectable eMachine. the first thing i noticed they needed was a new video card. i picked up a cheap 64mb radeon 7000 for them, but when i tried to install it, i just get one big headache. now i'm thinking the problem is the on board video built into the motherboard which uses a VIA KM226. i called emachine tech support and they told me to disable it in the device manager and then try installing the new card. okay, did that. windows loads up, but the video card isn't working properly. in the device manager, it says "cannot find enough free resources. please disable another device". okay, great. what does that mean? did i not properly disable the old one? i also unistalled the old drivers and checked the bios to see if there was a way to disable it there. nothing. is it possible this machine isn't good enough for such a dated card? here are the system specs: AMD Athlon™ XP 2200+ Processor (1.800 GHz) VIA KM 266 60 GB HDD AOL membership included (LOL!) 256 MB DDR (PC 2100) (upgraded to 512) 48x16x40x Max. CD-RW Drive; 16x Max. DVD AC '97 Audio S3 ProSavage8™ integrated (1 AGP slot available for upgrade) seems hopeless, but thanks for any help!

Well, as they say nothing is hopeless until it's hopeless. Did you look in Device Manager to see if there is any conflict there? I suspect you may need to Remove any drivers for the internal video. BTW, I am using this very same, cheap, video right now. The eMachines are kind of a strange beast, they do everything on the cheap and dirty model. But I don't see why we can't put in a different (& better) video board. Here is a method to try: Shutdown and remove the Radeon board and then reboot to BIOS Setup, reenabling the internal video. Once you are back in Windows, go to Device Manager and Remove the drivers for the internal video, and shutdown. Put the Radeon back in, and reboot to Setup, disabling once again the internal video. Continue to boot and Windows will detect your new board. Use the driver disk that came with it, follow the onscreen prompts and this should get you up and running. Let me know how this goes, and we'll take it from there. Good luck :)

first off, thanks for the speedy reply and an interest in helping me. it's greatly appreciated :) anyway, i already tried everything you mentioned. i was hoping for sure that there'd be a way to disable it in the bios, but there's nothing there. you can disable the built in audio, but not video. right now i have everything set back to the default settings. the radeon drivers and the board itself are completely removed and the standard video is up and running with it's drivers reinstalled. there are no conflicts with it this way, but when i disable it in device manager, unistall it, shut down and install the radeon, the device manager still claims there's an error "not enough free resources". i wish i knew what that meant exactly. anyway, i'm going to try this again a few times and see if there's anything that can be done. thanks for the help.

well, i think i've found the problem, but i don't know how to correct it yet. if i go to display properties>settings>advanced>adapter>properties>resources, i see that the new card is sharing resources with "VIA CPU to AGP controller". the problem is i'm unable to alter the resources for either device and disabling/uninstalling the controller insn't an option since i need it. here are the resources it lists as sharing: Input/Output Range 03B0 - 03BB used by: VIA CPU to AGP Controller Input/Output Range 03C0 - 03DF used by: VIA CPU to AGP Controller Memory Range 000A0000 - 000BFFFF used by: VIA CPU to AGP Controller just an update. at least i have a better idea of what the problem is. boy, i can't wait to get back home to my real computer ;)

Remove all drivers and entries in device manger, reboot PC and let Windows install default drivers, do not offer any. In device manager you will have two graphic cards entries, disable the on-board device, (do not remove entry), reboot PC and you now should have only the graphics card in device manger as the only enabled device, if that is the case now update to correct driver.

btw also set the BIOS to AGP as first graphics device.......... if it has that option.

ugh, well thanks for the help, guys, but i'm just not having any luck. i've tried all your suggestions, but nothing's working. the only thing left for me to try is to just buy a whole new motherboard, but it's just not worth it. hell, the only reason i was trying to get a new video card in here was so i could play some games while visiting my folks. guess i can go a few days without... or maybe play some classics. thanks again, all. and remember, never buy an eMachine.