My friend has an old Compaq Presario with a defective 15-pin connector built into the MB 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

The way it 'should' work:

1. Plug in you PCI Graphics Card.
2. Change the settings in BIOS from AGP to PCI.
3. Install the drivers for the new card (don't let windows install it automatically).
4. Reboot.
5. All done!

If you are having difficulties with that, then there may be some other factors which are not initially presenting themselves...

Hope that helps!!

Thanks, I'll report back on Tuesday. If that doesn't work, I'll have to find somebody who can replace the integrated VGA plug on the MB.

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?

Sounds like Bill Gates getting in there to me.... Nah not sure why!!??