Blank monitor at startup

[Guest]

I am having some difficulty with my monitor. When my
computer first starts, my monitor remains asleep until XP
reaches the "select user" page. This is mostly an
annoyance, since it operates normally after this, but I
am concerned becaue I cannot see system or BIOS
information when my computer restarts.
This began when I installed a Radeon 7500 PCI card in my
computer. At first I was unable to see anything but by
playing around I was able to arrange for the computer to
use monior number two as the primary monitor. Despite the
fact that XP provides checkboxes to select your primary
display, this was very difficult to do. The checkboxes
are grayed out most of the time and I do not know why.
There is also a third monitor shown in Display Properties
and a second monitor in my Hardware Profile. I am not
sure where this came from but as you can see, two of
these three monitors claim to be using my Optiquest V73.
The other seems to be attached to the video card that
came with the system. Despite my efforts to disable or
uninstall the default monitor, it continues to reappear
in my hardware profile. It will not go away.

Please advise me on what I can do to solve this problem.
Radeon has told me that I might need to disable my on-
board video card. Dell has told me that it is not
possible with this chipset. I am sure there is a solution
through Windows but I either cannot find it or do not
know how to use it.

 

[Rich Barry]

That's weird that Dell did not provide a Disable onboard graphics in
the Bios. I would go to Device Manager and
uninstall ALL the monitors that showup there. Let WinXP reinstall your
Monitor. Did you install the correct Radeon
Drivers for the Card. Stay away from the latest. Go back a year and
choose an older driver.

 

[Eric Burns]

I had a system based on a SIS630 chipset in which I could
not disable the onboard AGP graphics. This was very
disappointing because of the shared memory architecture,
my memory bandwidth was severly starved, causing a 600mhz
machine to run at the speed a 300mhz might. (resulting
Memory bandwidth was about 60mb/s when it should have
been about 10 times that without onboard video) Anyways,
back to the point
Even though I could not disable the onboard adapter, the
system BIOS still let me chose which display to
initialize first. I'm not sure how extensive DELL BIOS
are, most pre built name brand systems are pretty
limited. But connect your monitor to the onboard card so
you can access bios, and see if there is an option
like "Init card first" with the options PCI and AGP, and
change it to PCI. Once this is done, you can hopefully
move the monitor connection back to the Radeon 7500.
The reason you cant see anything until windows boots is,
only one card can use the basic VGA resources, and
unfortunately, the other card is the one with first dibs
on it.