Dual Monitor reboot problems

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jamie
  • Start date Start date
J

Jamie

I've just added a 2nd monitor to my Dell P4 (1.7ghz 786
ram) system with XP. Rather than buying a dual monitor
card I've added a Pine 3D Phantom PCI card alongside the
AGP card that was in the pc when I bought it (RAGE 128mb
or something).

The card was recognised fine, loaded up drivers etc and it
all worked fine until I switched off the pc and then went
back later and switched it back on. The computer won't
start up unless it's in safe mode and then I have to
uninstall and reinstall the new drivers each time I
reboot.

For some reason I don't experience the same problem when I
restart the computer - it switches itself off and on and
again with the correct configuration - only when I
manually switch off and switch on.

Just been on one site and some guy said he didn't think
you could run 2 VGA cards in the same system....
 
You can run two video cards at one time. The primary is going to be your
AGP. You may have to change some settings in your BIOS to set AGP as
first, PCI as second. Also, it may be a driver conflict. In Safe Mode,
I would uninstall any software you installed for the Pine card,
uninstall the ATI drivers, REBOOT, and see if Windows can load. Once in
Windows (hopefully), install the latest ATI drivers and the latest Pine
3D Phantom drivers. Hopefully that works for you.

Nathan McNulty
 
Thanks for coming back to me

Yes I did all the Bios stuff and the two monitors worked
fine. There were no driver conflicts highlighted
everything was said to be working fine.

What are the ATI drivers?
What if Windows doesn't load?
Where would I go to get the latest drivers - I guess the
websites for each card's manufacturers?

Thanks again
 
You'll want to install the drivers. Your AGP card I believe is an ATI
Rage 128 (could be regular or Pro). Here is a link to both of the
drivers for you ;)

ATI - http://www.ati.com/home/online/CatalystXPdriver.html

Pine (I don't know model number, so can't provide a direct link). Try
this though - http://download.sis.com/ and select the SiS300 or SiS315
series (depending on which one you have), and download those drivers too.

Hopefully with the drivers installed, you may be able to get it running
better. Also, you may want to read this:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307873

Nathan McNulty
 
FYI - from experience, Dell's running both AGP and PCI video cards
"usually" not "always" require making the PCI card the primary card
used during boot (within the BIOS). Once XP is up and running, you
can change/make either card the primary display.
 
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