[G_thompson]

I have a titan of a hardware conflict that I doubt anyone can really help me with but I thought somebody on this site would like a challenge.

Here is my problem simplified:

There is an integrated video card(diamond stealth 2000 pro, supposedly) that is either not there or not working. and this is causing motherboard resource conflicts with the working plug and play video card I am trying to use.

Here is the details:

ok, I have a vga display adapter integrated into the back panel of my workstation as most computers do. I also have an ethernet adapter in the same panel and both devices are directly installed on the motherboard(i.e. not plug and play).

In the device manager it shows that the ethernet controller is taking motherboard resources from the video card.

I do not have a driver for the ethernet adapter or for the two PCI bus controllers listed under the "other devices" tab with it(I never knew bus controllers needed drivers).

I tried to disable and remove the ethernet and bus controllers from the device manager and although it did free the resources for the video card I came to learn that there isnt really a video card installed into the motherboard(somehow).

So next I tried to plug in an old s3 virge gx video card into the system and then free up the resources for it the same way I did for the ghost video card I explained earlier except now even though all of the devices are disabled and removed from the device manager the video card still isnt getting the motherboard resources it needs.

My computer specs:

a custom-built workstation(I inherited it) running on an Intel L440GX motherboard with dual pentium III processors(not sure if both are being used) run under windows 98.

 

[G_thompson]

I have heard that interrupts can be shared but the bios(or windows) doesnt seem to want to to do that because I keep getting the message that the display adapter isnt functioning because it cant find input/output resources.

I am almost sure this is caused by the integrated video card either not existing or not working.

thanks for the tip on the pnp/motherboard thing, I had no idea and that could have created alot more problems.

yesterday i put a windows diagnostic program on my system to try and identify the display adapter(I took out the s3 card and ran the "add new hardware" program to have it tell me that my integrated display adapter was now a cirrus instead of a diamond) and the diag. program identified my display adapter under pnp but not under the primary system devices where it should be(it didnt identify the make of the card).

so now I am left with an unidentified video card that has resource conflicts on the motherboard and might not even exist although it is detected everytime windows starts.

Would it be possible to disable the unidentified card completely(motherboard resources and all) in the bios and refer the system to my s3 virge?

also what refresher thing are you talking about?

finally, thanks for the help.