Graphics cards not being recognized?

[Gtowns]

About a year ago I thought I would update the drivers of my radeon 9600
card. I uninstalled the previous drivers and everything ATI on my PC,
including in the registry, as instructed in the manual.

After re-booting the card was not recognized, and when I tried to load
the new software/drivers manually the install finished with a message
to go back to vgasave, which I already had. Eventually I just bought
another 9600 which was recognized and installed.

However two months ago my copy of Tiger Woods 2007 started clipping, so
again I tried to install new drivers and the same thing happened.
Neither card now worked.

Fed up with ATI i bought a second-hand nVidia 6600 card which installed
but was strangely jerky in games (nor was it showing in Device
Manager), so this time I had no choice. The same thing happened,
leaving none of the cards working either by searching for new hardware
or by installing the software manually. I am now using an old TNT2
card.

I am usually quite good with hardware installs but this has me stumped.


Why do the cards stop working when I uninstall their software/drivers?
Is it because there's something left behind within the PC/registry each
time, is there a setting I need to change? I'm using an MSI 6567 mobo
with no other PC to test them on.

Any ideas folks?

 

[smlunatick]

Both ATi and nVidia drivers uninstalls leave a lot of orphaned
files/settings on PCs. If you were to head over to www.guru3d.com and
view their forums, you would see that a lot of people have the same
problems. Fortunately, someone came up with a "simple" solution to
help. Look for Driver Clearer Pro, which is a utility that removes the
left-over driver "crap" so that we can replace the video drivers.

Also, you should install the latest motherboard chipset drivers so that
you update, or get, the correct AGP slot driver. AGP slot drivers
usually help is detecting and configuring video cards.

 

[Gtowns]

You must have onboard video then.If so,before you install any video card,you
must open device mgr,expand the tree for display adapters,R.click the
hardware,
select uninstall,close out,shutdown pc,power off.Install card,upon start
up,enter
the BIOS,advanced chipset,set for new card PCI or AGP,save & exit.Once in xp,
install drivers/software for new card,but before you restart pc,uninstall
boards
display adapter hardware again.After that youre set to go...

I don't think there is any onboard graphics; the mobo doesn't have its
own connector, only the ones that comes with the graphics cards, which
now just seem to attach purely for that purpose.

I tried your advice with the bios but still no luck. Also only the TNT2
was showing in Device Manager, and even that won't install since I
uninstalled its drivers yesterday in my latest attempt to get one of
the radeon 9600's to be recognized by the system.

 

[Gtowns]

Both ATi and nVidia drivers uninstalls leave a lot of orphaned
files/settings on PCs. If you were to head over to www.guru3d.com and
view their forums, you would see that a lot of people have the same
problems. Fortunately, someone came up with a "simple" solution to
help. Look for Driver Clearer Pro, which is a utility that removes the
left-over driver "crap" so that we can replace the video drivers.

Also, you should install the latest motherboard chipset drivers so that
you update, or get, the correct AGP slot driver. AGP slot drivers
usually help is detecting and configuring video cards.

Tried Driver Cleaner a few times. It listed a lot of LEGACY entries in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE that it was deleting, but they are still there, and
it gives me a deletion error message when I try to do it manually.

With each card being recognized only the first time I guess that each
one is leaving behind a registry entry which causes the pc to not
consider it as new hardware when re-installing. I have checked the
registry and have deleted a few video files, but am afraid of deleting
the wrong one and leaving my machine useless.

Can anyone confirm this and, if so, point me in the right direction.