PCI Radeon + Dell Intel Mobo + WinXP = System hangs at bootup?

[Jeeves]

A friend of mine has a DELL that, much to my cargin, she will not get rid of. The thing has an Intel board on it, with intel's onboard video card. Now she does a lot of video watching, and whenever she full-screens anything with the onboard card it gets blocky, obviously due to the on-board's crappiness.

Thus, I decided to get her a nice Radeon to replace the onboard, however I had to go with getting her a PCI card due to the Dell not having any AGP slot. Upon installing the Radeon, all of the bios boot messages show up just fine, as does the "Loading WinXP Pro" screen with the sliding bar... but then the screen goes black with two little white dots at the very top scan line of the screen.

Anyone know what might be up with that? I'd really like to get this Radeon working as a replacement for her crap-ass onboard video... and I got this Radeon nice and cheap (retail too!) but it don't wanna boot up!

(PS: the card WORKS... it shows all of the boot messages and the winXP loading screen, AND i have the onboard video disabled in the Bios... hmph!)

-J

 

[Lonman]

Hook up the monitor to the onboard video adapter, go in and uninstall all the video drivers for the onboard... you should be able to boot up then and install the radeon drivers. I'm guessing it's trying to apply the onboard drivers to the new card.

You should also be able to boot up into safe mode... that will only load the barest essential drivers. The Radeons are kind of tricky... make sure you follow their directions closely for installing the drivers (usually requires several reboots).