I finally decided to try a SIS6326 based PCI video card to upgrade my HP Pavilion 7050. This Pavilion has onboard video that does not seem to release control to an added PCI video card. I am trying to give a fairly extensive description of what I have tried.. and does not work.. and am also writing my questions in CAPs so they will be easy to spot in the text. 1. I double checked the Intel site & confirmed that there is no jumper or other settings that will disable the onboard video. I did see a bios for my system on their web site: DO I NEED TO UPDATE THE BIOS ON THE 7050? 2. I then tried the "generic" steps listed on the HP web site: "Start" "Settings" "Control Panel" "System Properties" "Device Manager" "Display Adapters" ... then change the display adapter from S3 Trio to "Display a list of all drivers..." "Standard Display Adapter (VGA)" ...then restarted then changed to the SIS6326 - powered off and installed the new video card. Restarted the computer with the monitor connected to the new video card... and it completely stayed blank...then I moved the monitor connect back to the on-board video and found the system had detected a problem with the video display adapter and had automatically started the hardware wizard... which will not detect the new card. 3. I checked the SIS/KASERCORP web sites, and e-mailed their tech support 3X don't see an answer there. 4. I checked the bios to see if I could turn off the on-board video there and didn't see any way to get at the on-board video. The bios is AMI 1.00.11.BTOL. I checked the megatrends website and they refer people to the board OEM, in this case Intel. 5. I checked the MS site and saw some comments about removing the *.inf file but all I fould in the windows\system\inf\other directory was the inf for the sis6326 card. WHICH *.INF DOES THE CURRENT ON-BOARD VIDEO CARD USE? There were also comments that the system.ini should define the videodriver as "pnpdriver.drv" to make the plug and play work; and my system does have that line but I noticed that if I do the "control panel ->system" etc and look at the components by connection, that the video and the PCI bridge are not subsets of the PLUG and PLAY. COULD THIS BE WHY THE "ADD HARDWARE WIZARD" DOES NOT DETECT(ENUM) THE NEW PCI CARD? COULD THE PLUG_AND_PLAY_"READY" PART OF THE SYSTEM SPECS MEAN THAT THE SYSTEMS COULD SOMEDAY BE PLUG AND PLAY BUT WASN"T WITH THE SW THAT CAME WITH IT? 6. Two other things I noticed were under the system performance tab, it talked about having no PCMCIA devices: I thought PCMCIA was portable computer PCI format.. WHY WOULD THE SYSTEM PERFORMANCE TAB TRY TO LIST PCMCIA DEVICES? The other thing strange is that metal card slot cover is about 0.25" too long. I bought this card at Fry's so don't expect any support coming from that direction. 7. This is an old PC and started life as a Pentium 100, MS Windows 95 4.00 95 0a, 20195-OEM-0002507-84993. I've upgraded CPU (evergreen) and hard-disk (maxtor) and added lan card for cable web access - I'd like a modest improvement in DirectX performance which the SIS6326 should provide.

The .inf files are @ C:\windows\inf, you won't see the inf folder unless the "show all files" option is checked. As to which .inf file it is, I don't know as you haven't listed the name & # of the vid chip. Regarding the onboard vid card,you don't have an:" ON-BOARD VIDEO CARD ",if you did why didn't you unplug it. Onboard means what is say's, it refers to components that are soldered to the mobo. Cards plug into sockets that are onboard. Did you select the disable option for the unknown onboard video chip in Device Manager? Hope this gives you some useful clues.

Probably, if you can't make changes within BIOS or on the motherboard, you will not be able to use your new video card. Recently, a wrong setting in BIOS prevented an onboard video adapter on my new computer from working in Windows. Not only that but it caused my computer to crash during restart. Your only hope may be a BIOS update or a new computer.

Thank you for replying. The HP 7050 Pavilion used an Intel "advanced/mn" motherboard and acording to the hkey the onboard video is "S3 TRIO 32/64 PCI=desc; display=class; 00 00 00 00=conf; display/0001=driver; 000=hw rev; and S3=mfg", running dxdiag says the chip type is "TRIO32(86C732)REV A", but running the evergreen test stuff says it is "Morrison onboard video; PCI video vc=40 vid=5333 did=8811". The HP people say you can't disable the HW and must disable it by changing the display adapter - I have checked the intel dwg and I don't see anyway to disable the onboard video, but what the HP people say about the booting the system up with the display adapter changed to std vga also doesn't seem to do anything. They did tell me that this system uses the msdisp.inf (I have at least 100 inf files) and so I tried renaming this to see if the system would at least ask if it was to use the S3 video during boot, but it didn't. Have either of you guys looked at the detlog.txt files that Win95 creates during boot?

Do you have "PCI VGA Palette Snoop" anywhere in BIOS? I sincerely doubt whether doing anything within Windows will help. The video card must be identified correctly by BIOS first and then by Windows. What happens when the computer is first turned on? Do you see any message at the top of your screen identifiying your new video adapter? You just might have to accept the fact that your computer is outdated for this purpose and you need a new motherboard (not so farfetched as it may seem).

Thank you for your help. The bios does have a "video palatte snoop" option and I've tried booting with it enabled and disabled but it doesn't seem to help. The HP people say that I shouldn't update the bios or horrible things happen - they also say the S3 onboard PCI video uses the "msdisp.inf" file and the system properties lists PCMCIA slots because the bios was developed for both laptops and desktops. Based on MS notes, I tried renaming the msdisp.inf file; I also made sure that the PCI/PCMCIA driver was 32 bit. The HP guys also think the problem is that the Sis card might have a predefined IRQ - and that it conflicts with a IRQ currently in use - or that the Sis driver that I installed might not be the correct one. I reloaded the drivers from the Sis web site but that didn't fix it. Pyotr - I think you are right - if I can't get the bios to recognize the card it will not be able to use it. Thanks for your help.

I updated the bios to MRBIOS V097A50N and boy does it do pnp (PLUG AND PLAY) now. It still doesn't see the Sis6326 card but I think I'll checkout the detlog some more and play with the IRQ numbers. DOES ANYONE KNOW WHERE I CAN FIND DOCUMENTATION FOR THE DETLOG? Strangely enough, the MS web site doesn't have any references of detlog when I search.