Monitoring the detectives

[peterbirks]

The man brought back my computer last night. He informed me that the company which built the video card that he installed in my machine so that it could run two monitors had gone bust, and that therefore there wasn't a driver that worked with Windows XP. On top of that, he returned the computer in the state that it was when he fucked it up on Friday night -- i.e., hanging as soon as it boots, even in safe mode.

One way to solve this was to enter the system not in safe mode but in one of the special reduced video modes and then to strip out the driver for the new card (which was what I discovered about 2am on the day I tried to install XP for the first time). However, I now know how to get at the card slots on the HP. You need to unscrew a couple of retention screws, which hinges the air-cooler at 90 degrees, allowing you to get to the card slots.


So I did this and took out the video card. And my machine works fine: except, of course, that I only have one monitor.

And the company which manufactured that video card has not gone bust (it's the 3D Phantom XP 3800, I think, made by Pine), although it is a discontinued model. But what should matter is not the card, but the core chipset, which in this case is the SIS 315, manufactured by SIS in Taiwan. And I happen to know that the driver for XP does exist, because this is the driver (unhelpfully numbered version 3.15, a total coincidence) making the damn thing hang.

What I feel fairly sure is happening is that the main video card and the second video card are trying to access the same area of RAM when boot up occurs, hence the hang. This is really irritating, because I feel that the solution is a trivial matter of getting the SIS driver to access another part of RAM, or something like that. And that might be a matter of just changing a single BIOS setting.

I may do some messing around after I buy a new machine. For example, I could swap round the video ocards, so that the SIS is the primary and the NVidia is the secondary. Or I could try some other drivers, to see if they happened to work (the original driver for Windows ME "nearly" worked, but there were vertical lines all over the screen).

So, single monitor-bound again. Sigh. Any recommendations for base units that I could buy into which I can plug two monitors, and they will work without hassle?

Comments

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

Possibly worth checking: many cards have analog (D-SUB?) and digital (DVI?) outputs. I think it's possible to attach a monitor to each (and to get two screens' worth, not just the same one twice). But I don't have two screens at home to test it on.

For a purpose-built dual-head DVI setup (are you DVI or analog) you could consider a "Matrox Millenium P650 Low-profile PCI" card. About £100 at Dabs.com, they claim to have 8 in stock. It would appear that my (dual-screen) work PC has one of these. The 64MB one gets you up to 2048 x 1536 resolution, possibly more if colour rsolution is dropped, although that's just a guess.

Yes but

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I don't really understand what you are saying here, Mike. Are you referring to the video card that I took out, or the one that I left in? Also, how do I find out if I am analog or DVI? What do you mean by "output"?

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Peter,

I don't how much if any time you spend on 2+2 forum, but their relatively new forum "computer technical help" has stuff like this all the time regarding dual monitor setups and what you need. You could search or ask a question and someone always seems to have an answer. Good luck.

BluffTHIS!

Yes But

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Thanks Bluff. I might give it a try, although it seems inevitable that the help on techie-biased forums is usually phrased in the way Mike's is above. I'm sure that it means something to somebody, because there appear to be subjects, verbs and objects at play. But the terms mean nothing to me. I've looked at a lot of computer help stuff online, and it's usually only one chance in a blue moon that a computer person can express themselves in a way that I understand what they are saying. Too much is taken for granted by the "sender" of the message. I always used to have the same problem with maths teachers. If concepts were explained slowly and clearly and logically, then I could understand them. But if a teacher jumped from A to Z via F, bypassing the "obvious" steps of B,C,D,E etc, then I would not only not understand them, but I would also get annoyed and resentful. It set back my maths learning many years, I suspect.

I have

[iadams.livejournal.com]

a Radeon 9250 card, for which I paid 49.99 in PCWorld. I also had to buy a DVI-VGA adapter, as the card has one VGA (analogue) and one DVI (digitial) connector, but I don't have a DVI monitor. I picked the card by asking the spotty (but polite and helpful!) youth employed by PCW which cards supported two monitors, and then bought the cheapest that did.

I had alread diasbaled the on-board video in the BIOS. I just removed the old card, put in the new one, then installed the drvier, and off I went. I just had to set up the card to give me two monitors using the Display control panel.

Re: I have

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Excellent stuff, Iain. So, all I need to know now is how to disable the on-board video in the BIOS and which is the viedo graphics card in the machine. I know how to open up the machine. I know how to take out cards, and the Display Control Panel is a piece of piss.

So, how to disable the on-board video in the BIOS, and I will be round PC World on Tuesday (or maybe even Maplins).

The video

[iadams.livejournal.com]

card is the one that you're plugging your monitor into (it has the 15 pin socket the size of n old 9 pin D connector, but with three rows of pins). It's almost certainly an AGP card not a PCI card (which means in layman's terms that it has a different sort of connector from all the other cards).

For the BIOS settings, you'll just have to press the appropriate 'settings' button as the system starts up, and wander through the set up looking for something likely. It'll be something like 'video' with choices 'AGP', and 'motherboard' or 'on-board'. If you previously had a one monitor video card working, it's probably already at the right setting anyway. You can at least take a look at the BIOS settings without changing them before setting out to buy a new card.

The way to tell if you have on-board video (which some machines don't) is to look for a video connector (see above) in amongst the built-in (i.e. not on a card) connectors.

As for PC World, why wait until Tuesday? ISTR buying my card and monitor there on a bank holiday Monday. FYI the full model numberof the card I bought is R9250-128ADT. I even found the box was the perfect size for the 350 poker chips I bought in SF three weeks later.

Re: The video

[(Anonymous)]

I read this and scratched my head, but I knew that I was almost there. So, one final question, I said to myself. What is the difference between "on-board" and "motherboard" in the BIOS settings? I thought that "on-board" was short for "on-motherboard". As Iain writes a couple of paras later, "the way to tell if you have on-board video is to look for a video connector amongst the built in (i.e. not on a card) connectors".

So, I thought, if it's "on-board" there will not be a separate card slotted into the motherboard. Is that right?

Then, like a flash, I got it. Iain meant that the settings might say "on-board" or "motherboard", but that these were synonymous!

I'm geting there, I'm getting there. But you can see the reason for the struggle. The big gap in my knowledge (take NOTHING for granted!) was that I thought that ALL computers came with a separate video card into which the video plug connected. I didn't know that on-board video existed.

So, obviously, if the video connector is on-board (= on-the-motherboard, yes?) I need to disable that so that the computer can look for the new video card that I have slotted in. This is the same as disabling the integrated graphics accelerator.

Hardware degree, here I come.

Re: The video

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Whoops, when I reply to a post from the laptop via the e-mail response, it doesn't automatically log me in. Stupid computers.

Re: The video

[iadams.livejournal.com]

You're there - the jargon might be defeating you, but I'd hope (so far correctly) that you'd manage the English.

Tune in next week for Hardware 102.

Re: The video

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Sorry to be stupid again, Iain, but a couple more questions:

1) You wrote "I had alread disabled the on-board video in the BIOS. I just removed the old card, put in the new one, then installed the driver, and off I went."

But if you had an on-motherboard video connector (which is implied by your statement that you disabled the on-motherboard video in the BIOS), surely you would not have had an old separate video monitor card to remove?

2) If you put in the new video card (ignorning my puzzlement at the apparent contradiction about removing a card that I didn't think you had in the first place), how can you see a screen to install a driver, when you need the driver to be working to see the screen?

Re: The video

[iadams.livejournal.com]

When I built the box, I had a video card from my old machine that was beeter than the on-board video, so I was using that until I decided I really neede two monitors.

When I put the new card in, the card and the machine worked together in 'lowest common denominator' mode. PC hardware is plug'n'play to the extent of the most basic mode working to a common standard. Which ISTR was something like 640x480. I reckon now that I could have got away with starting windows in VGA mode, but I got this horrible very low resolution mode, which to be honest was a bit of a pain (some dialogue boxes were slightly larger than the screen). It worked well enough to install the driver, reboot, and set up properly in the Display control panel.