Think my Vid card is toast but I need to make sure.

[Beefcake]

Hey guys, I'm short on time so I'm going to have to post a simple version of what happened. I think my old video card is gone but I want to make sure before I spend tons of money for a new one.

Basically what happened was I went to start one of my games and the computer locked up when it started. I gave it a few seconds to make sure it wasn't just "stalled" before I did a hard shutdown. After the shutdown I waited a minute and rebooted. Everything went normal except after the Windows startup screen my computer just went black instead of showing the desktop, and my moniter gave me the "no data present message" like it does after I shutdown. So I did another hard shutdown (couldn't see anything) and did another rebot... same thing. I did yet another hard shut down and booted into safe mode, as far as I can tell everything seemed in order so I tried one more time in normal mode, black. Lucky for me I still have the old old old card that came with the computer, so I poped the GF5900 out and poped the GFMX420 back in. Start compter up and comes to desktop just fine. Now I am assuming that most likely my video card has failed but I just wanted to ask if there are any test or anything I should know before I get a new one?

[Krusty]

Hrm.... I can give a couple of thoughts before you go out and get a new card.

Got another PC? Try the card in there, if so.

In safe mode, go to device manager and delete the video card and reboot.

IMO, if you POST, you get safe mode, etc, it might be corrupt drivers, but the card seems to work.

Windows desktop takes precious little resources to display on a vid card. It shouldn't do that. If the card were partially fried (and it still does safe mode and POST so it's not totally fried) I'd think it would display SOMETHING in windows, but perhaps be corrupted, or show artifacts.

Also when booting up try the "last safe configuration" or whatever it's called.


Try removing the device in device manager first, then windows should boot up normally and re-install it.

[Sting138]

Yes you can try booting to last known good configuration but IMHO it wont do any good if you have had a successful boot since the issue occured. As Krusty said: take the card out and try it in another machine or a good card in yours to really determine if its the card, drivers, motherboard, or Operating System.

[Irwink!]

Using "last known good configuration" from safe mode absolutely WILL NOT have any effect one way or another if you've been able to successfully boot even once since any negative configuration changes might have been made that you're trying to recover from. It is meant to enable you to recover from changes that prevent you from booting. Once you have successfully booted whatever configuration was in place during the boot process becomes the "last known good configuration". Seems there's always been alot of confusion over that.

[Kev367th]

Last Known Good Configuration - Is the configuration that you successfully logged into Windows.
It does not differentiate between a complete login to desktop, or a lockup/crash after logging in.

The fact you can login in safe mode and get to the desktop, but not on a normal login 'suggests' you may have corrupted the graphics card drivers.

Login using safe mode plus networking.
Grab drivers off the web.
Try a re-install.
Reboot and login normally.

[Beefcake]

Thanks guys, I belive I had a bad driver problem.

I removed the Card and replaced it with my old GeForce MX420 and the computer started up and ran fine. I then removed the MX420 and put in the Geforce FX5900 and low and behold it started up just fine, in normal boot mode no less. (I wasn't fast enough to hit the safe mode button). I deleted the old drivers, restarted, installed the new downloaded drivers, restarted, and everything seems back to normal. Hopefully the old girl will hold up till I can get the funds for a new rig.