defective 15-pin vga connector

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Gswiss

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My friend has an old Compaq Presario with a defective 15-pin connector and I’m having difficulties in installing a new Graphics card on his pc.

History :

After every boot on an XP-Home SP1 Presario, display works fine for a few seconds, then the screen is filled with small gray and white rectangular cells. Screen is okay because it works properly on another pc.

I bought an ATI Radeon 9250 PCI card, figuring that the 15-pin VGA connector on the original motherboard was defective. Once the card was put into the pci slot, the pc would not boot.

I inserted the card at home on my own pc and found that in the BIOS of my Asus P4P800 MB, you have to choose which of AGP or PCI is primary. I selected PCI and got the boot started. However, at one point in time the screen froze on the Windows logo but I noticed that the boot appeared to have completed successfully (I heard the chimes from Windows).

Questions :

1. I imagine that the drivers for the 9250 graphics card should be installed while running under my current graphics card. Maybe I should also uninstall that card in the Device Manager. Then, I should change the primary from AGP to PCI in the BIOS and boot using the 9250 card. Is that how to get things running properly?
2. If that’s the way to go about it, how do I operate on the Presario where I am “blind”? How could I install the 9250 drivers if that’s where the hang-up is? How could I uninstall the VGA connector in the Device Manager?

Any suggestion is welcome
 
-Uninstall the original graphics card (display adapter) in device manager.
-Set the display mode to VGA 800x600.
-If it's an older MB go into bios and disable on board video.
-Install the new drivers. With a 9250 (older card) make sure you get the version for the 9250 and the operating system that is installed (98, XP, Home PRO, etc.) Sometimes the older cards aren't supported in the latest driver.

Uninstalling old video drivers can get challenging, especially when changing brands. Use a program like ccleaner.exe (free download at majorgeeks.com and others).

Once the new card is installed change the display resolution to your desired setting.

PS Welcome to OSNN.
 
For removing drivers I would look for driver cleaner .. that works very well
 
I got the screen to work but I don’t know why.

I started by going into the BIOS where I found 2 items which were close to what I wanted to do : I enabled VGA PCI snoop and disabled Onboard VGA monochrome. When I inserted the 9250 pci card, the pc would not boot. I tried different combinations of the above enable/disables. No soap. I tried different pci slots. Same thing. The Presario MB appears to be allergic to the card.

I then removed the card, plugged the screen into the 15-pin connector and reset the BIOS settings to their original status. I booted in Safe Mode and was successful all the way through (no problem with the screen). In the Display item of the Control Panel, I selected a resolution of 640x480 pixels and colours at 16 bits. I pressed Apply.

When I rebooted normally, the whole process was successful. I had a peek at the Display item and was surprised to see that the figures were 1024x768 and 32 bits respectively!
 
Compaq Presario. Pain in the ****ing behind. Owned one for almost 5 years, never looked back when I replaced it. As for the screen and whatnot, I had the screen show up bad blocks when I had got bad ram from Staples a few times (they rub those things over the ****ing magnet and wonder why it does not work anymore (to remove the security stuff)). Anyways, be happy you got it fixed.

As for it being allergic to PCI graphics cards. It is not that it is allergic, some of the Compaq Presario's just don't want to accept certain hardware out of what it is supposed to come with. Mine would not accept certain ram, even-though it was technically the same RAM that was in it from the factory. It was even more of a pain when it would not accept a Western Digital hard drive (to replace the 15 GB that was in it).

Compaq hardware is something to leave lying, even when it looks to be a good machine, it is unreliable, and worst of all gives more troubles than they are worth.
 
Now that HP have bought out Compaq, i heard that HP tend to sell today "exclusive" hardware as you described for Compaq. But I haven't had a chance to check this out.

Anyhow, the best thing is to build your own pc if you can and not rely on brands.
 

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