NVIDIA & Dell - New Card?

[benjamming]

I have a Dell Dimension 4600 with a NVIDIA GeForce FX5200 card running Windoze XP SP 3. I am having a problem with the display that appears to be a result of the video card since I have tried two different monitors with the same results. However, if I boot XP in safe mode, the display problems never appear.

The problem is that the screen will flash away and come back. Eventually, the monitor turns off. If I reboot, the display is fine through the boot process but starts flickering, lines on the screen, etc. until the monitor turns off again. Again, this problem is never experienced in safe mode.

I've considered formatting the hard drive & starting over to see if it is a software corruption issue. Is it really the video card?

 

[03cvpi]

It's probably a problem w/SP3. We have several HP comps that developed monitor problems after sp3 was installed. We fixed by updating the system bios to the latest release and updating the video card bios.

 

[benjamming]

but it operated fine for a while after SP3 was installed.

 

[UberxG]

Try reinstalling the Driver

links

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

uninstall in add/remove programs restart the computer and install the driver

 

[OVERKILL]

The video card is likely going south. Do you have another card you could swap it out for? The 5200 is like a $20.00 card, so you should be able to pick up a cheap alternative of comparable performance for around the same price.

 

[benjamming]

Everything also works fine if I started up with "Enable VGA Mode".

I tried updating the BIOS from A09 to A12 but it gave me an error every time. It said that I would need to be signed in as the administrator. I am the aministrator on my home computer! Ah!

I tried updating the video card driver by downloading from the Dell website but it caused a system halt. Dell sucks.

The solution was updating the driver last night from the nVIDIA website. All is well now.

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted By: benjamming
Everything also works fine if I started up with "Enable VGA Mode".

I tried updating the BIOS from A09 to A12 but it gave me an error every time. It said that I would need to be signed in as the administrator. I am the aministrator on my home computer! Ah!

I tried updating the video card driver by downloading from the Dell website but it caused a system halt. Dell sucks.

The solution was updating the driver last night from the nVIDIA website. All is well now.


"VGA mode" forces the card to run in VESA mode, which will work most of the time even on a completely FUBAR card. It utilizes NONE of the card's hardware acceleration capabilities.

Glad to hear the NVidia reference drivers worked, most PC OEM's don't provide up-to-date drivers for their systems, DELL included, which is why companies like Intel, NVidia, ATI...etc provide drivers on their sites.

 

[UberxG]

Originally Posted By: benjamming


The solution was updating the driver last night from the nVIDIA website. All is well now.

your welcome