no desktop icons

[pullinghairout]

:disgust: I have been having a problem with my Dell Dimension computer 8100 for a month now. I reformatted the HD a month ago. At that time I wanted to upgrade my video card. Which I bought one and installed it and it started with not showing the HD and the Cd Rom drive in the BIOS mode... not recongizing them on a IDE config test.. I got another card keeping my fingers crossed it was the card since it was working fine before it. Then the monitor wouldn't come out of standby mode, the orange light didn't turn green when I turned the computer tower on, but the computer did stay on. I was then told that they thought the computer was too old for that card.. the card was a Nvidia 64mb Geforce4 MX 440.. So I went and bought a ATI 32mb Stealth.. which I was told its a little older card. It sees the HD and cd rom drive and the monitor comes on fine but whether I boot up in safe mode or normal the desktop icons doesn't come up.. its just a blank gray screen. I bought this computer brand new through Dell in 2001, so it is a older computer but I have put a ATI 9800xt 256 video in there and it worked fine.. which is a fairly new card still. Can someone please help me with this?.. I have really racked my brain and everyone I know about this and no one can figure it out. I really don't want to have to pay someone to fix it if it's something small or can be fixed by myself.
I have been told that I can put a PCI video card in it and it should work fine.. can I do that since it's AGP?
Thanks so much for your help!

 

[GregANDTCH]

I have been told that I can put a PCI video card in it and it should work fine

I think that would work OK.

Dell page

 

[voigts]

AGP is not AGP. What I mean by that is the older agp boards like you have are agp 2x-4x. The newer motherboards and newer video cards as of about the ati 9200-present require an agp 8x slot. Agp 2x-4x and agp 8x have different voltage requirements. I know this because I ran into this situation a while back when I wanted to keep my ati8500 but couldn't in changing out my motherboard because of the agp voltage issue. You would need an older agp 2x-4x compatible card, or maybe even an agp 1x-2x card to have it work correctly on that board.

 

[pullinghairout]

I am having another problem that I was having with the 2nd card that I bought.. the Nvidia card.. The HD and CD rom drive are missing. I boot up the computer and I get an error saying f1 to retry boot and f2 to setup. I go to setup and there is only the diskette drive in the boot seq, no cd or hd option to select.

The motherboard is a 4x port and the actual card that I am trying to get to work now is a ATI Radeon 7000 Stealth S60 32mb. I can't seem to locate if it supports a 8x board or not.

I think I might try the pci card just for a whirl wind.