Video Problem - Any ideas?

[Atheras]

My mother-in-law has a computer that's a Celeron 300A with 256MBs ram and an old nVidia TNT card.....now, I used to have this system here at my place as a sort of storage server, but I gave it to her since she needed it more than I did. Before doing so I removed my burner from it and put in a 56x cd-rom. It had worked perfectly here....but ever since I swapped cd-roms it's been kind of quirky.

The biggest problem is that if you shut the computer off without actually shutting down windows, unlike most systems that just run scandisk when coming back....this one boots into Windows and says that the Display Adapater is configured incorrectly, please fix it. It then pops up the display properties and if you click the "Advanced" button so that you can go and change the adapter it only has the "General" tab......you have to click "OK" and then click "Advanced" again to get the Adapter, Monitor, etc tabs to show up. Once you finally get into that you can change the adapter and reinstall the drivers....and then it'll boot up again normally.

The system is using Windows98 first edition....and all it has is the TNT, an Aureal SQ2500, and a Netgear NIC (don't remember which one, but I think it's the EA201).

Aside from the problem above...sometimes if you restart the computer it'll hang before loading windows....it'll just have a blackscreen with a little flashing underscore style cursor at the top left...and just sit there.

If anyone has any ideas I'd greatly appreciate it.....

Edit
Forgot....it's using nVidia reference drivers version 23.11, which is the same drivers it was using before when it worked perfectly.

 

[Thor86]

Are you using the same monitor with that system, or a different one at your in-laws? Try setting up the different monitor if possible and that should solve your problem. If it's the same monitor, then you should check and see if the video card is seated properly, maybe during the move/cd-rom install, something might have dis-lodged the vid card or something else in the system.

 

[NukemAll]

That's 98 for ya. Not much you can do about it. Still, make sure all the critical and recommended updates from windows update are installed. As for the video, remove the existing driver and install the latest. To do that, first change the adaptor drive to Standard VGA, rebooting whenever prompted. Then install the new driver. You can get the most recent supported driver from www.nvidia.com.

 

[Atheras]

Thor86
On the monitor, yes and no. Here I was using the same monitor, and it still did it. They bought a new monitor to use since the one I was using is a 15" and old (and I needed it). This monitor does the same thing. I thought of the monitor before they ever bought one, and had swapped the old 15" with my 17" and it still did it.

Re-seating the videocard...I did this...and this is the number one thing I'm pointing a finger at. I've seated and reseated the videocard.....and after that, I reseated it again It was the first thing I thought of when installing the CD-Rom "Oh, I must have bumped the videocard and unseated it." But that doesn't seem to be helping...though I'll check the videocard again and make sure that after reseating it fits tightly and isn't just unseating with the slightest bump.

NukemAll
It has the same drivers that it had when it was working...and these are the latest drivers from nVidia's site. That was another thing that I thought of...it's using version 23.11, which is what is for download on nVidia's site. I know you can get newer versions from other sites...but frankly, I'd like to stay away from them