LancerZero
Baseband Member
- Messages
- 37
Yup, it's me again, with more problems this time . . .
My display was going flaky - horizontal shadows on the screen (like, if I had what was supposed to be a white screen with a black box in the middle, it would appear that the black box was on a grey bar) - and through testing (i.e., switching monitors with another computer and still having the same problem) I deduced it to be that the graphics card was going spooky.
It was an 8MB nVidia TNT2 card. I bought an ATI Radeon 7000 64MB card to replace it, and installed it. It solved the display problem I'd been having, but created one, possibly two new problems:
1. seemingly at random, starting at reboot the screen would be . . . weird. For those of you with satellite TV, you know how it goes all freaky (disjointed, pixellated blocks all over the screen) when there's heavy cloud cover or heavy rain? It was like that. And it mixed up the ASCII characters too, which I thought was odd. But then I'd restart it again, and sometimes it'll be fine, and sometimes not.
2. And though Windows XP doesn't seem to have a problem with the new GFX card, SuSE 9.3 Pro (Linux) doesn't seem to fond of it. Or maybe that's not the problem, but regardless it will no longer boot into KDE. Instead, I get a console. I'm not sure that it's the GFX card, but I'm pretty sure it's not related to the other piece of hardware I installed:
Since they had cheap 5.1 sound cards, I decided to get one of those, too. I took out the 56K modem and put the new sound card in. My Compaq Presario 5000 5WV270 has a motherboard-mounted sound card, so I went into the BIOS and disabled it. Thing is, though Windows XP will detect the sound card, it won't let me use it. I tried using the driver CD's install program, but it said it couldn't detect the sound card. When I try to install the driver from the CD using the Add New Hardware function of the Control Panel, it tells me that a third-party checker program is preventing the install, without telling me which one it is. I'd post the exact content of the message but for the fact I can't make it come up anymore. That's because after I simply copied the relevant driver files to the hard drive and directed the windows add hardware program there, it found the drivers, got busy installing them . . .but as soon as the "copying files" progress bar got to 100%, the computer restarted itself. No "Computer must be restarted for the changes to take effect" click box, nothing. Screen went black, compy restarted, Windows ran a disk checker and found a few errors. When Windows boots up after that, it says it's just recovered from a "serious error", and that it was caused by a third-party driver. And not only that, but when I open up Device Manager I see a yellow exclamation point next to the following icons:
16x/48x DVD-ROM
Philips CDD4801 CD-R/RW
Plug and Play Software Device Enumerator
and the sound card simply shows up as "unkown device". So, because both my CD drives are down, I can't tell you exactly what the error message said . . . but I went to CompUSA's website and downloaded the XP driver from them (it's their product), and it did the exact same thing. Once, when I restarted after that, the disk drives worked again; but every reboot since that once, though I've changed nothing else, they won't work.
Obviously, the driver is screwed up. But since it is the company's driver, is there anything I can do, or should I just return it? And how can I repair the damage it's done?
Okay, I switched the sound card to another PCI slot and (almost) everything works (nearly) as it should. The CD drives work fine now, as does the sound card and video card - when in windows. But my video card screwed up Linux somethin' fierce. I even tried putting in the SuSE 9.3 install CDs again and going to "update" so it could just reinstall with the new hardware, but somewhere during the installation it went from the slick-looking YaST interface to a simple, BIOS-esque blue/cyan/amber interface. Also, the mouse cursor disappeared, several ASCII characters appeared blurred, and it stopped responding to any of my keyboard buttons except for enter. Like, it'd say Abort (as in press "a" to abort), and I'd press "a", and nothing would happen. Not even the "vulcan death-grip" of Ctrl+Alt+Del did anything.
I'd wonder about overheating, or my power source (it's only 250W), but like I said it all works fine under XP, even running WarCraft III under medium/high detail levels for over an hour.
Can anyone here help me with this, or should I pick up my problem and put it in the Linux forum?
My display was going flaky - horizontal shadows on the screen (like, if I had what was supposed to be a white screen with a black box in the middle, it would appear that the black box was on a grey bar) - and through testing (i.e., switching monitors with another computer and still having the same problem) I deduced it to be that the graphics card was going spooky.
It was an 8MB nVidia TNT2 card. I bought an ATI Radeon 7000 64MB card to replace it, and installed it. It solved the display problem I'd been having, but created one, possibly two new problems:
1. seemingly at random, starting at reboot the screen would be . . . weird. For those of you with satellite TV, you know how it goes all freaky (disjointed, pixellated blocks all over the screen) when there's heavy cloud cover or heavy rain? It was like that. And it mixed up the ASCII characters too, which I thought was odd. But then I'd restart it again, and sometimes it'll be fine, and sometimes not.
2. And though Windows XP doesn't seem to have a problem with the new GFX card, SuSE 9.3 Pro (Linux) doesn't seem to fond of it. Or maybe that's not the problem, but regardless it will no longer boot into KDE. Instead, I get a console. I'm not sure that it's the GFX card, but I'm pretty sure it's not related to the other piece of hardware I installed:
Since they had cheap 5.1 sound cards, I decided to get one of those, too. I took out the 56K modem and put the new sound card in. My Compaq Presario 5000 5WV270 has a motherboard-mounted sound card, so I went into the BIOS and disabled it. Thing is, though Windows XP will detect the sound card, it won't let me use it. I tried using the driver CD's install program, but it said it couldn't detect the sound card. When I try to install the driver from the CD using the Add New Hardware function of the Control Panel, it tells me that a third-party checker program is preventing the install, without telling me which one it is. I'd post the exact content of the message but for the fact I can't make it come up anymore. That's because after I simply copied the relevant driver files to the hard drive and directed the windows add hardware program there, it found the drivers, got busy installing them . . .but as soon as the "copying files" progress bar got to 100%, the computer restarted itself. No "Computer must be restarted for the changes to take effect" click box, nothing. Screen went black, compy restarted, Windows ran a disk checker and found a few errors. When Windows boots up after that, it says it's just recovered from a "serious error", and that it was caused by a third-party driver. And not only that, but when I open up Device Manager I see a yellow exclamation point next to the following icons:
16x/48x DVD-ROM
Philips CDD4801 CD-R/RW
Plug and Play Software Device Enumerator
and the sound card simply shows up as "unkown device". So, because both my CD drives are down, I can't tell you exactly what the error message said . . . but I went to CompUSA's website and downloaded the XP driver from them (it's their product), and it did the exact same thing. Once, when I restarted after that, the disk drives worked again; but every reboot since that once, though I've changed nothing else, they won't work.
Obviously, the driver is screwed up. But since it is the company's driver, is there anything I can do, or should I just return it? And how can I repair the damage it's done?
Okay, I switched the sound card to another PCI slot and (almost) everything works (nearly) as it should. The CD drives work fine now, as does the sound card and video card - when in windows. But my video card screwed up Linux somethin' fierce. I even tried putting in the SuSE 9.3 install CDs again and going to "update" so it could just reinstall with the new hardware, but somewhere during the installation it went from the slick-looking YaST interface to a simple, BIOS-esque blue/cyan/amber interface. Also, the mouse cursor disappeared, several ASCII characters appeared blurred, and it stopped responding to any of my keyboard buttons except for enter. Like, it'd say Abort (as in press "a" to abort), and I'd press "a", and nothing would happen. Not even the "vulcan death-grip" of Ctrl+Alt+Del did anything.
I'd wonder about overheating, or my power source (it's only 250W), but like I said it all works fine under XP, even running WarCraft III under medium/high detail levels for over an hour.
Can anyone here help me with this, or should I pick up my problem and put it in the Linux forum?
