My son has a Compaq Presario with onboard graphics. We have tried to install a PCI video card with no luck. The computer recognizes the card and installs it and the drivers correctly. When the onboard video is disabled/uninstalled and the BIOS is changed to default to PCI video instead of onboard, the new card works fine during XP startup, but hangs with a blank screen at the XP login stage. Is there a sequence I am missing on this install?

======================================================= It will help to know what PCI video card we are talkinga about. There are those cards out there that will NOT install properly if you install the card before the device drivers (ie you must install the drivers and then physically put the card in the computer). If this is the case it should, of course, be in the paper work/directions that come with the card. Most importantly to anyone being able to help you is knowing the hardware we are talking about. borelli35

Sorry The card is a nVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-SE with 64 MB DDR.

I had this same problem on my friends emachines. What's happening is windows has both display ports running, and the old built in port is default. What you need to do is plug the monitor into the old port, not the PCI card. It should show everything normally. You then need to disable the old graphics chip, otherwise windows will use it instead of your new PCI card. I think you can do this by either right clicking on your desktop, display properties, settings. Under Display: it should have 2 listed. One is your old onboard, the other is the new. Check which is which, it should say "1. blah monitor on INTEL 10595whatever, 2. blah monitor on nVIDIA Geforce4" select the first one, hit advanced, click adaptor, hit properties. At the bottom at Device Usage, select Do Not Use This Device. Once you hit okay to everything, the screen will go black. Switch the monitor cable into the new PCI graphics card, and everything should be fine from there. Enjoy! =)

Thanks for the suggestion, but that didn't work. Here's what happened. I installed the nVIDIA GeForce4 card and started the computer. The card was recognized and installed by XP. I then installed the updated driver I downloaded from the website. In the display properties both video cards show. I disabled the onboard Intel card. The restart option then popped up. I restarted the computer, still hooked to the onboard. It started fine, but showed the onboard to be disabled. I restarted again and entered the BIOS setup. I changed the display default to PCI from ONBOARD. I saved the change and restarted. The computer hung during windows boot. I managed to restart in vga mode and the computer reported that there was a driver problem to report to Microsoft. If I changed the mode from the VGA, in display properties, it froze. I tried to disable the onboard as you suggested and switch the monitor cable to the new card, but there was no signal. It wasn't until I used setup to change the BIOS that the nVIDIA card was active. Should I have uninstalled the onboard video drivers before entering the BIOS setup for the PCI card? Any more suggestions would be appreciated... Thx