riverdale21

I recently purchased from AGPTEK (http://www.agptek.com/) a Nvidia GeForce FX5500 128mb PCI and have been having nothing but difficulty with it. I have disabled the onboard graphics via hardware manager because there are no BIOS provisions to do so. I started by installing the drivers on the computer, disabling integrated video card, then I shut down the computer and installed the card. What happened next confused me. Upon start-up I can see the POST and Windows XP load screen but when Windows was supposed to come up all that came up was a black screen with my mouse pointer. What the hell is going on? I sat on the phone with Dell tech support and tried many different things but none of them worked. My video card from my old computer (3dFX Voodoo3 card) works fine on my new computer so it's not the PCI slots. Again, the card I am installing is a Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 128mb PCI. Any suggestions?

System Specs:
Dell Dimension Desktop
Windows XP SP2
AOC Spectrum 9GLRSA Monitor
Intel Celeron 2.4g
512mb Ram
33gb HD
Intel 82845g Extreme graphics (integrated)

UPDATE:

Tried the video card out on my old computer... no signal to monitor and when powered on the system made one long beep then three fast beeps. The computer sounded like it was loading Windows but no picture came up.

Computer Specs:
Unknown Motherboard with Phoenix BIOS
AMD K6-2 350mhz
10GB HD
Windows 98

UncleMacro

Have you taken a look at this faq?

That's a very odd order in which to do things. I doubt that NVIDIA's drivers would install correctly with the new video board not installed in the computer. The normal order is to boot with the new video board using default Windows VGA driver and then install the drivers.

You said your BIOS can't disable the onboard video but does it have the ability to control which is the primary video adapter? It usually appears as "Primary Video Controller", "Init Display First", "Graphic Adapter Priority", "Primary Graphics Adapter", "Primary VGA BIOS", or something like that. You'll need to set it to PCI before things are going to work right. The black screen with the mouse pointer may be because your integrated video is still the primary video in the system once Windows gets going.

The most common order for installation of a PCI board in a machine with integrated video is:

1: Start your machine up and go into the BIOS and set the "Primary Video Controller" to PCI
2: Boot Windows (in safe mode if necessary)
3: Install new drivers for your PCI video board
4: Boot again to make sure that the PCI board works okay
5: Disable the integrated video in the device manager

Things might have gotten a bit askew if you tried to install the PCI board video drivers with it not inserted in the machine. You might try to get back to your previous state with the monitor connected to your integrated video. Then try to remove the NVIDIA drivers (might require DriverCleaner's help). Then try to go through the steps above (or maybe more specific ones for your model from the FAQ)

riverdale21

What I typed in regards to installation of the drivers first may be a little bit misleading. They came in a ZIP file on a cd so I decompressed them to my harddrive so I can have the drivers ready when Windows booted up next time.

As far as the BIOS control over the onboard video there were very few options available. This is the most restricted BIOS that I have ever seen. Apparently Dell doesn't like their customers messing with things. Under the Integrated Peripherals section the only two options for integrated video were that you could toggle it to Auto or Onboard only. I had it toggled to Auto. When that didn't work I disabled the onboard video through Device Manager in Windows. I still had the same problem. The problem also occurred when I attempted to load Windows in Safe mode. It would show safe mode at all four corners and tell me the Windows XP Build and everything at the top but Windows would never fully load.

I am going to try your suggestion and a few more things I had in mind today and hopefully that will get it to work. If not I got in contact with the company I had purchased the card from for an exchange.

UncleMacro

Oops. I was kind of wondering why the driver installation program didn't crap out when it saw that the video board wasn't installed in the machine.

It seems like you already tried just about everything. "Auto" is the correct setting when you want a PCI board to be your primary video.

About the only other thing I can think to try is to remove the PCI board and go back into the BIOS and set your onboard video to be your primary display again. Reboot and get its driver reenabled or reinstalled. Then insert the PCI video board and then its drivers and see if you can make the PCI board show up as your secondary monitor in a dual monitor rig. From your BIOS it sounds like you can use both your integrated video and a separate video card as a dual monitor setup. Try the PCI board in each slot because there are occasional cases where it will work in one but not another. If you can't get the PCI board to work as a secondary monitor then it's probably a hardware problem. Of course, you either have to have two monitors or move the monitor back and forth between the two video systems to try this out.

riverdale21

I had the same thought, Marco. I tried setting the BIOS to onboard and running two monitors however the same thing happened. It would show the POST and the WinXP load screen but once explorer was supposed to open it was just a black screen with the mouse pointer. Both monitors were black but only one of them had the pointer. I'm thinking it's just a dead card. I'm going to exchange it for one that hopefully works.

Thanks for your help and suggestions.