Aww... Just great!

[Semi_N00b]

I tried to make a post earlier, but I can't find it again... It was about my problems with a SoundBlaster 5.1 Live! Digital card.

Now I've pulled it out, and now I am trying to salvage of what's left of my video card... Or at least to figure out WHAT THE F*** THE PROBLEM IS.

I have Win98 SE, and a K7VZA mobo, uncertain of manufacturer. I have, newbishly enough, tried almost inserted a metal plier in my system, a few days ago, trying to pull out an analog sound cord from the onboard sound card. I realized that I was about to put shiny metal static things in my fragile fragile system, and stopped fiddling with the plier, but I am not sure if I managed to kill something. (The analog sound slot was in between my GeForce 4 MX440 and my network card).

Problem as of now: When I try to change the screen resolution, that is, when I am clicking the tab pane "settings" in the screen menu, the monitor goes black, except for a blinking underscore in the top left.

I tried setting the hardware acceleration to "none"...

Any ideas?

 

[tech4hire]

the motherboard is an ECS. I have no idea what happend. If the video card works and only has problems when you change resolution, that sounds more like a driver problem(download newest and install). If you just installed this sound card and were using onboard audio. make sure it is disabled in the bios. Disable the onboard audio.

 

[Semi_N00b]

Nom it's not a driver problem. Hypothesis: It worked before the soundcard drove me crazy, therefore the setting must be working.

Yup, it drove me crazy. In fact, it drove me so crazy that I think I'm a lemon! *Goes off to jump into a pond that's thinking it's Gin & Tonic*

*returns later, drying himself with a towel*

Returned the soundcard a while ago, didn't have the patience to struggle with that any further. And about the resolution problem...

1. Hardware seems to be OK. Programs can freely change the screen resolution.

2. The problem occurs when I try to change the resolution by myself, using the "properties > Settings" thingy on the desktop. The moment I click the "settings" tab, the computer goes into something that looks like a part of the startup, with a little _ blinking in the top left corner of the screen.

Please help me? I am stuck with 256 colors for christs sake

 

[tech4hire]

reload your OS.

 

[Semi_N00b]

Sounds fair...

Gonna try to reinstall my detonator drivers first though, it all seems a little slow... Refreshing marks when loading pages... And... stuff...

How does one reload the OS anyway? What does that mean?

I am slightly n00bish

 

[Semi_N00b]

Uninstalled detonator drivers, installed newest version of 'em...

IT WORKS!

I'm not gonna tingle any more with my computer for now... Damn tired of all that stuff...

Too bad for my 2.1 speaker set and this here 52x burner drive

 

[Semi_N00b]

Oh my god... This is all wrong...

Ok, here's what happened..

I downloaded a program, VidRes, and forced a 1280x960 resolution. Later I uninstalled the video drivers (nVidia Detonator for GeForce 4 MX 440), downloaded the new drivers and restarted. It all looked like what I had seen a lot of times before now, colours all wrong and such. 640x480. Hmm, this is good, I thought. I installed the new drivers, rebooted a few times, and it worked, just as my previous post claimed. I then had fun with that for a couple of hours, until I wanted to play BattleField 1942 with a friend. Game wouldn't start. Hmm... The hardware support checkbox in the audio settings was checked, and now I had the card no more. So I tried to manually switch it to "off". Then I realized that I had set the hardware acceleration to the graphics card to "none". That could be it, I thought, and I went to set it to "full" once more. I did, and it asked me to reboot. I did, but there was no screen! Only darkness on the monitor, but the computer was working. I then took away the power, and started again, with the same crappy resolution as mentioned earlier. I tried setting the hardware acceleration to "none" once more, but nothing new happens. Restart, black screen, restart, crappy resolution.

Driving me nuts.. In fact, it's driving me so nuts that I'm thinking I'm a strawberry! Anyone has a daiquiri?

 

[Semi_N00b]

More info...

Uninstalled drivers, reinstalled. Got the colors to work again. Then I tried setting it to the normal setting, which you may have guessed by now, is 1280x960 32 bit. I told it to restart with these settings. It closed windows and displayed the "Restarting windows" text in startup DOS. (Not sure if that's the exact text, but I'm Danish and it says something else here). Then it began again with the flashing underscore in the top left corner of the screen. Leading nowhere, I turned off the power for a cold boot. Getting into windows, trying to set the resolution, something interesting happens. When I press the "settings" tab, it says "RUNDLL32.EXE (I think, but you know it) HAS PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION yada yada." Then I went here and wrote "More info... Uninstalled drivers, reinstalled..." *starts an infinite loop*

 

[tech4hire]

i would say your down to two possible probs. the video card is going bad or the OS is getting corrupt. You may can do a repair of your OS using the 6 boot disks from microsoft. if you have another video card i would try it for a while.