Dude!

I am currently fixing a PC up for my brother-in-law but am having a few problems re-installing Windows.

When I boot the PC to DOS the screen is all messed up and illegable - the monitor is fine as I have tested it with mine and its the same.

When I turn the PC on the Video BIOS and Mobo BIOS screens are both fine and then it goes illegable. The odd thing is, when it actually boots to Windows its fine again!?!

Any ideas? - I have reseated the video card in the AGP slot and tried booting with different boot disks but its the same.

lightning101

Did you buy cheap ram by any chance ?


If so disable ACPI in the Bios and see if the problem goes away.

Try reseating ram to slot 2.

Try another stick of ram if possible from another working PC

Dude!

Cheers mate - will give it a go

Don't think it's 'cheap' RAM - its been in my PC working fine till recently!

bob269

Try setting the Bios to Factory Defaults, there are some VGA settings which could of changed

Dude!

thanks mate - will be trying all of this 2nite and let you know if I am successfull!

Dude!

tried all the above and still no luck

I wish I could explain the garbled output - just like a screen of cracked tiles i suppose!

Could the graphics card be dead? - dont want 2 buy a new one if its not that!

lightning101

Put the graphics card in another machine - that will give you a final answer. Only other thing would be a processor that has overheated.

Dude!

well after trying everthing I found the problem

The machine did not like the network card I stuck in it!

Now swapped for one out of my machine and its now working fine

Cheers all