Nvidia card upgrade issues

I've tried searching this up and didn't see anything else like it from the topics I searched under, so I hope this isn't a reapeat topic.

I've just gotten a nvidia geforce fx 5200 to replace my nvidia geforce 2. I've followed several people's instructions (including the driver updating information from this very forum) yet my problem still persists.

Said issue is that my card refuses to work dispite my computer having the right requirements for it. I've disabled and uninstalled the old card and done everything I've read to in way of getting the computer to stop using the old card and start using the new one. Despite, my efforts, however, my monitor STILL acts as though the computer has NOT been turned on if the new card is in...and when the old card is in it promptly reinstalls it even though I did what I could to make sure the computer wouldn't run on it anymore.

I'm really out of ideas of what I should do about this.

 

I don't know a lot about this type of thing but my first thought would be maybe there's a setting your bios where you can enable or disable the AGP slot on the motherboard. Maybe have a look in there and see. Just guessing here.

I'm going to move this to the hardware forum. You'll probably get more help there with this then here.

Oh, I see you're new here. Welcome to the board!

 

I too recently changed graphics cards, from an nVidia GeForce FX 5500 to a 6200, by just swapping them as Christer did. It worked OK, but I got the message "Since the last activation the hardware profile of your computer has changed . . . ." and I had to re-activate by telephone.
Not a real problem, even thought completely unexpected, but be prepared just in case Meira!

Roger

 

Similarly, there are a lot of things I don't understand but the simple fact of the matter is that it doesn't work this way. Detecting (and remembering) Hard Drives is quite different than what goes on with Video Cards.

OK Christer, I knew you were going to ask. Brief Summary Overview - Windows NT, 2000 and XP keep a list of partitions, identifying each by a signature. The list is maintained in the registry. The partition signature is derived from the DiskID and the partition's starting sector number. The DiskID (sometimes called the "NT serial number ") is a group of four bytes in the master boot sector (LBA 0) at location 01B8h. Each partition's starting sector number is doubled and combined with the DiskID to form a unique signature for that partition. Purists may wish to know the signature appears actually to be derived from the partition's starting byte number rather than starting sector number. No, I didn't write this - its for your "Understandment " (new non-translatable geek word for your technical vocabulary)

Back to the matter at hand - there are a couple of approaches you can try if this 5200 upgrade continues to be problematic. You can uninstall the old video card while in safe mode, then shut down and replace the old card with the new and reboot. Then try loading new drivers from the CD that came with the card. Perhaps more thorough is to use DriverCleaner (should be a link from one of the stickies above). Excercise caution here as you may also have Nvidia chipset drivers and you don't want to remove anything except your video drivers using DriverCleaner. Once complete, you can reboot and then try loading your new drivers from the mfg's CD.

If no go - you probably have a bad video card. Incidently, what Christer, Roger and Pete referenced usually works with NVidia cards but you still need to install the correct drivers or a universal update from NVidia. ATI cards aren't quite so forgiving.

Good Luck.

 

Hi Christer,

I use racks too, for Linux OS's, Vista, etc., with no problems at all, but I understand that XP puts far more weight on the graphics card than on HD's when creating and checking the ID number for activation. (I'm sure that Bill will tell me if I'm wrong on this. )
What did surprise me was that XP picked up on the card change for validation, not for a hardware or driver change. Obviously it checks validation during boot, sometimes at least.

Roger

 

Well, perhaps MieraBates never comes back to read any of this discussion but upon booting into safe mode, the card's video drivers do not get loaded - thus they become very removable.

Roger - I chuckle at your "correct me" reference -
I read his every word with amazement and admiration - never knew so much knowledge would fit between two ears. From my perspective, its humbling.

Removable drive bays - was first introduced to this several years ago by a friend who used them to swap and copy MP3's with others - been using them every since and wouldn't know what to do without them.

 

Teflon Memory can be a good thing - it permits one to bounce ideas around for a while. Sitting on one's hands however - well, I guess that depends upon one's thumb position.

Re: Your last question - Boot to safe mode, uninstall the drivers using add/remove in CPL, go to System in CPL Device Manager - uninstall the device if still present, shut down, remove the old card, install the new card, boot up, install the correct drivers.

 

Bill? Two ears?
He's a committee

 

Lots more reply than I expected. Thank you for the information. I'll try a few of the things that I'd not heard of before.

Thank you for the welcome as well. Sorry you had to move my topic, I thought I was posting in the hardware forum, but I guess I somehow got a little lost.

I'll post again to say if the issues have cleaned up or not.

 

Personally, I would not do this. The second choice for naming the "internet" was "RFPPMVBDI" which is short for "Repository of Forum Posts of People with Messed-up Video due to a Borked Driver Install ". Even if it appeared that a simple card swap worked, problems might not appear until a much more demanding application is run.

That's because XP did a lookup and found it had default drivers for your card. This will always happen with a video card if XP has the drivers for it. This is why using Driver Cleaner Pro is so important. You do what's called a CAB File Cleaning (in Safe Mode) and it rids XP's CAB files of video card drivers. Then when you reboot and the card is detected, XP asks you to load the new drivers because it can't find any of its own. Without doing the CAB cleaning, installing new drivers can be an exercise in aggravation. You could do a driver update I suppose but I'm no big fan of that either.

All of my trepidation about this stems from just how error-prone the driver model or paradigm (if you will) is in today's operating systems. I thought I read that Vista was going to solve all of these borked driver installs - not sure - maybe I was just fantasizing.

I'll mess with hardware till if sweats drops of blood but when it comes to anything related to software, I ALWAYS squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube!

Gary

 

So far I'm still not having luck. It'd be my sort of luck that this card might be faulty, considering I already had to return one card because it had a different number of slots that it had been pictured as having. I also have no idea how I'd go about getting a refund for this one if it IS faulty. I'll try more of the suggested methods tomorrow but for now I'm out of time to deal with it.

 

Upon re-reading your first post....I assume you've pulled the old card out of the PC and have placed the new AGP card in the AGP slot. At this point there are only a handful of things that could prevent a video signal from being sent to the monitor:

- faulty AGP slot
- faulty AGP video card
- jumper telling the mainboard to use onboard video
- bios setting telling the mainboard to use onboard video (I may be wrong here because that would be a really stupid thing in case the onboad video was defective).

I have no experience with onboard video so the last two are hypothetical for me. Since you've been using a different video card I'm guessing that onboard video is not really in play here.

The bios setting that tells the mainboard which type of video card to look for first would not interfere with you getting a video signal.

Gary