XP SP3 and AGP440 - can I get my video card drivers back?

Dell Dimension 8100
ATI Radeon 2400 Pro AGP video card

I recently had to re-install Windows XP on my machine. Prior to that, I had no video driver issues. The ATI card worked fine. After re-installing XP, I didn't re-install the ATI drivers right away. I decided to get current with all the Windows updates first.

After installing SP3, the machine would hang during bootup. Some research led me to disable the AGP400 service from the Recovery Console. This did the trick and the computer started up fine.

But, when I tried to install my ATI video drivers, the installation routine insisted that there was no compatible video card installed. I checked Device Manager, and there was no display adapter listed.

After calls to ATI and Dell (in which I mentioned both times that I had disabled AGP400), the best answer was to re-seat the card, reset the BIOS to default values and try again. Otherwise, the card must be defective.

After trying all that and then doing further research, I'm convinced that turning off the AGP400 service is what's causing Windows to stop recognizing the card and use it's own generic VGA driver instead. But I can't re-start the service, because the computer continues to hang, even in Safe Mode.

Any ideas? Thanks.

 

Thanks. It's not the card that came with the Dell. It was purchased aftermarket and added later. But you're right, the whole system is pretty old. My kids use it for their games, so I thought that getting the video driver correct would be important. Regular 1024 x 768 seems no worse than before.