If I ever offer to help you with a computer problem, please smack some sense into me

[Towncrier]

I offered to upgrade a co-worker's computer to make use of a CPU that I no longer needed. Bill took me up on my offer and when I got to work Monday morning, the PC was sitting on my desk. Since I have absolutely no will power, I immediately set aside my tasks at hand and started the upgrade. Here I am, 16 hours later, still trying to get his PC to work. I am so tired, I may just put my head down on my desk and try to get some sleep. The darn PC still doesn't work. I've tried just about every trick that I know (and a couple that I found on the internet), but at this point, the PC is winning the battle. The thing is, if I don't get it fixed tonight, I'll be tempted to work on it Tuesday. Since I have a big design review on Wednesday, I best put my efforts towards that.

So if I ever offer to help you with a PC problem, just politely say "no" and kick me.

 

[Keli]

Oh, this sounds just like me. I see that someone needs a little help with something I can do so I immediately offer to help (just can't keep quiet) and then when I do the same thing with their computer I've done a thousand times with mine and it doesn't work. I spend forever on it and finally either get it working or call my brother and beg for help. Oh yes, I feel your pain, lol.

 

[CookieGVB]

TC - you're still at work??? GO HOMEEEEE!!! *smack*

 

[jfulcer]

TC,

Awww, it's not that bad. We've all been in the same spot. Really.

I had the same problem trying to upgrade the motherboard on one of my servers a few months back. Nothing I could do would get it to work. All I ever got was the blue screen of death when it booted.

Ok, let us in on the particulars and the rest of us DIS geeks can try to help you out. This means you Alex.

 

[Dan Murphy]

I have spent some of those nights without sleep in the past (not many of recent though, thank goodness). Go home, John.

 

[WebmasterAlex]

Yea like what's the problem? Details man, details!

 

[tc]

Whenever I need computer help, I pm Alex. Really, I do.

 

[Towncrier]

Tekram P6L40-A4 motherboard with 300Mhz Pentium II.

The computer would not run a particular game, so I suggested a replacement for the SIS 4Mb video card. I told Bill NOT to buy an ATI card because I've had nothing but trouble with their drivers since forever. So he buys an Ati Rage 128 Pro card from CompUSA. Apparently it installed OK. But I wanted to upgrade CPU to a Celeron 566E on a Slot-1 adapter that I just pulled out of my home system.

Problem 1: System won't boot with Celeron
Solution: Upgrade Award Bios from 1.03 to 1.09

Problem 2: New Bios decides to totally reconfigure the motherboard and now the ATI card will only limp along in "safe" mode.

Things I have tried:
1. Switch back to VGA driver. Regedit to remove ALL references to ATI. Wipe all ATI files off the hard drive.
(I've done this about a dozen times now - I'm pretty good at it)
2. Make sure that the latest AGP driver from Win98 is installed for the LX chipset.
3. Manually extract vcomm.vxd, vdd.vxd, vdmad.vxd, etc from Win98 CAB files.
4. Examine bootlog.txt and discover that the fonts directory (specifically ttfcache) is a bit flaky. Delete ttfcache.
5. Loaded tweakui and wintop for my amusement

The symptoms are that, on the first reboot after installing the ATI drivers (that came with this OEM piece of work), the system hangs and presents me with a C:\> prompt. If I reboot, the system comes up, but the driver will only allow 640x480x16 color mode. When I look at bootlog.txt, the very last things loaded are Display.drv and Ati2i9aa.dll. Then everything stops.

So there you have it in a nutshell. I'm about googled out. I am willing to entertain any suggestions.

BTW - The system is loaded with DirectX 8.1 - I have just loaded DirectX 9.0 in hopes of totally screwing up the computer.

 

[Towncrier]

I failed to mention that our IT guru just kept walking by me all day long shaking his head and chuckling.

 

[WebmasterAlex]

well here are a few things to try...
Some older ATI drivers for that card...
drivers

Does it have a NIC card in it? If so take it out and remove that driver, see what happens...

 

[Towncrier]

No NIC card. It's a pretty bare bones system. I'll take a look at the older drivers although this card is one of those "ATI Inside" cards. Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[WebmasterAlex]

oh thought it was real ATI ...who made it?

 

[WebmasterAlex]

and try increasing the AGP apeture size in the bios....

 

[Towncrier]

It appears to be a "real" ATI card, but when I tried the suggested drivers from the ATI website, they refused to load. The driver CD is marked "RAGE 128 Pro 32MB AGP (5446)", so I assume that ATI manufactured this card.

I just pulled the cover off the machine and realized that part of my problem might be the Creative Labs Encore board that the video card seems to be feeding.

 

[WebmasterAlex]

ok here's another one.. if there is a PCI latency timer setting in the bios change it to 10

 

[WebmasterAlex]

What's it say on the card itself...

 

[Towncrier]

I'm trying the AGP aperture now. I'll check the PCI latency timer next. The funny thing is that it only fails to boot when the driver is initially being installed. From that point forward, it will boot every time, but with an incomplete driver installation.

I just pulled the card from the PC. The only markings on the front say "A5PT" ver 1.0 - On the back is "Made in China".

UPDATE

Apparently it's a Power Color video card. I guess Bill didn't spare any expense on this baby. The drivers on their website are ATI's reference driver set (that I tried much earlier today). I suppose that I could try them again (after scrubbing the registry).

 

[jfulcer]

I am not sure what this may affect, but is it possible that you may need to upgrade to win98SE in order for the ATi card to work with the new BIOS?

Or would that be sending you down the path of frustration further?

 

[WebmasterAlex]

Here's a driver for that A5pt card
driver

 

[Towncrier]

The system is running Win98SE (upgraded from Win95 some time ago). I'll try the reference driver again.