Graphics Card Problem?

trackrat

Birmingham UK
Joined
5 Jan 2004
Messages
154
A friend has just phoned me, hwe has aproblem with his computer.
He is running XP pro with SP2.
He switched on his computer and the windows loading page with the bar that goes across came on then the screen went blue and then black, so he rebooted and just a black screen.
Could the graphics card have gone?.
the computer is 31/2 years old.
 
Thread title modified.

One question mark is sufficient. Thank you.
 
Here is what to look for:

Turn PC and monitor off completely for 1 minute then check the monitor cables and if your friend is safe inside a pc have him pop the cover and make sure the cards are all seated firmly. Sometimes a tug on the video cable can unseat the card.

Then turn it back on and check for:
1) Do the fans spin? Yes indicates power supply is partially working.
2) Do the keyboard lights flash? Yes indicates CPU and Motherboard are partially working.
3) Does the system beep (one beep is good, multiple beeps (long and short) are an error code write it down and post it back here with the bios type). Or you can look and astound your friend with your tech knowledge at:
http://www.bioscentral.com/
4) Does the green (or orange) power light on the monitor flash, come on steady or stay off?
5) Does the boot screen show up at all on the monitor?

PS Ignore the mod's they seem to be getting cranky this summer (too many quesiton marks???). Must have just gotten their electric bills.
 
Thanks for that answer LeeJend.
Problem solved, it was not the graphics card.
Apparently a lightening strike took out a serial modem, so he replaced it with a USB modem (yes some are still on dial up) without removing the serial modem.
How this affected the AGP bus I have not got a clue,unless it was sharing the same IRQ, but after him telling me about the modem I told him to take out the USB modem, and his screen worked at bootup, so I told him to go into Device manager and Uninstall both modems, then switch off and disconnect the serial modem and reboot, it detected the new modem asked for the drivers and is working OK now.
 

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Any of the SP crew still out there?
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