Dual monitor problem

[Arcex]

At my company a few of the managers have 2 monitors booting from the same PC. They all have identical PC's, HP Compaq DC5100 SFF's. One monitor runs from the integrated Intel 900 chipset video card, the other runs from an EVGA FX5200 PCI card or 5500 card I installed.

1 PC has no problem booting, works every time. The other 2 PC's intermittently freeze at the Windows loading screen. Sometimes if the restart it will boot fine, sometimes it won't. Drivers and software are all up to date, there is no specific software running on the PC's that freeze and all hardware has been swapped out on the PC's that don't work to troubleshoot for hardware problems. Any ideas?

Here are some of the PC specs:

Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHZ w. MT'ing
1 GB PC3200 Micron RAM
80 GB hard drive (some WD, some Maxtor)
integrated Intel 900 chipset video card
EVGA FX5200 or 5500 PCI card

 

[erwos]

Might be power supply issues. 5200s don't suck down much juice, but SFF PCs typically don't have much PSU to spare, either.

 

[Arcex]

That was one of the things I thought it might be at first but I swapped it out so I know it's not a faulty PSU, and the PC that works fine actually has several more USB-powered peripherals attached than the other PC's.

What's been strange the whole time is that the PC that I'd expect to have problems (based on hardware attached and 3rd party software installed) is the only PC that's worked perfectly since day one.

 

[imported_AndyT]

So, the problems occured after you installed the 2nd video card and added the new drivers?

Have you tried shutting off the on-board video to see if it's a driver conflict?

With the on-board video off, the driver won't load and you will just be using the add on card. That might tell you us something.

 

[Arcex]

It works fine with 1 or the other turned off, it only freezes intermittently when trying to use both at the same time.