Oh brother...

[Hermskii]

My nephew bought a new video card for his PC. Rather than foloow the directions for the install, he went to the device manager and disabled his current G-Force card. Then he turned of the computer, pulled out the old card and put in the new card. It shows the new cards bios info and all of the standard bios stuff at the start up but when the bios hands over control to Windows XP, it does exactly what it was told to do and kills the video card.

He can hear the start.wav play and everything but there is just a blank screen. He put the original card back in and gets the same thing. So he calls me at midnight and wants me to tell him how to fix it over the phone, LONG DISTANCE!

I tried to get him to go into safe mode but it gives him the same blank screen too. He tried safe mode VGA too and nothing. I'm stuck. I don't know what to tell him other than how much I really enjoyed the laugh when he told me he tried to uninstall the drivers by disabling the video card.

So, the question is, if you disable your video card in XP and then reboot to a blank screen, how do you get the video card to re-enable? Thanks

 

[Fern]

Other than a reformat/reinstall I dunno. Don't use winXP.

Consider this a free bump. If you don't get help here, might do another post in Op System section.

Fern

 

[munchow2]

You could try sticking an old VGA in the PCI slot and see if that helps. If not then reformat is the way to go.

 

[rbV5]

Last Known Good Configuration?

Link

 

[Rage187]

he plug in the molex connector? He plug the monitor back in?

 

[Hermskii]

We tried swapping out video cards already. Last known config boots up fine minus the video since it thinks it booted up fine like that the first time. What is a molex connector? Yes, he does have the monitor plugged in. Like I said, he sees everything fine in the bios until the windows part starts up and then it goes dark though sound and everything works. This is sorta cool in that I posted a problem nobody knows the answer to short of reformatiing. Thanks for your helpful hints so far.

 

[rbV5]

This is sorta cool in that I posted a problem nobody knows the answer to short of reformatiing. Thanks for your helpful hints so far

Not to burst your bubble, but you're only batting 4/122,542 at this point. Is your friend using an LCD monitor? Maybe try to plug in a CRT if possible, maybe its just not supporting VGA resolution.

 

[Hermskii]

Smart kid. He went to his sister' xp box and logged all the keystrokes required to get to the settings to renable the card. New question: What if he had done that but forced a restore point from say a week back. Would that have worked too? Does a restore point actually take your video options and settings into considerartion that you had a week ago???

 

[rbV5]

Smart kid. He went to his sister' xp box and logged all the keystrokes required to get to the settings to renable the card.

LOL, I guess thats one way to do it. The restore point does just that, it restores your PC to the state it was in at that point, yes.