Baumblog EST 1968 - A blog for the Baumbachs who originated in Syracuse, NY

So this evening I go to start my computer, it starts to run, gets halfway through loading windows, then it loses the display to the screen (computer stops delivering data to monitor - "No input detected" displayed on monitor.

Now, last night, I installed the latest Adobe Flashplayer 10 update. This was the first start up since that install.

Marc said about 2 hours later

This is almost definitely a video card driver, but it can be as simple as your resolution being incorrect.

Go into Safe Mode (F8 between the BIOS and Windows startup screen). There's not really a good way to set your resolution and have it stick from within Safe Mode (and even harder from Normal mode when you can't see anything ;) ). So your easiest solution is to uninstall the video card driver. Go into Control Panel -> Device Manager and find your video card and uninstall the driver for it.

At this point, you can either try installing the latest driver for your card from the manufacturer website, or you can try to boot into Normal mode and let Windows try to find one for you. I recommend getting the one from the manufacturer. After that, make sure your Windows Updates are up to date and you should be good to go.
Steve said about 2 hours later

I'll give that a shot. I also tried loading in safe mode, going to msconfig and disabling all start up things (per someone else's suggestion), no luck.
Geoff said about 24 hours later

Marc nailed it. Game, set, match.
Marc said 1 day later

Another option: http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-22454-screen-goes-blank-after-starting-windows Although this one would be odd to just crop up randomly.
GJ said 1 day later

More information needed. While the video card driver is likely the issue, there could be more at play.

Steve--are you seeing the hard drive continue to run after the screen winks out? Does it seem to behave like it's booting the rest of the way into windows, or does it seem to halt all work at the point where the screen dies?

Does the keyboard respond (can you toggle the caps lock light on or off) once the screen dies.

Depending on your answers, you could also be suffering from a virus attack, or more likely, a disk drive failure. Call me tonight and I'll be happy to walk you through debugging the machine.
GJ said 3 days later

So, are you back up and running?
Steve said 7 days later

No luck yet, waiting on getting home and getting a different video card out of my stash of old computer bits.

My motherboard does not have on board video.

I've tried uninstalling the drivers both from device manager and from add/remove programs. I've manually installed the drivers I had been using (from 2007) and the latest drivers, neither were successful.

Weird thing is, when the drivers are installed, there are two entries under display adapter - XP1600 blah blah blah and XP1600 blah blad blah SECONDARY. Now when I went through add/remove programs to remove these, it showed one as AGP type and one as PCI type. I'm not sure why, it's an AGP card. Now, the drivers are universal drivers for lots of cards, perhaps the drivers are set up to function with some AGP cards and some PCI cards?

Newbie question - can I buy a PCIExpress video card and plug it into my current motherboard (which is AGP but obviously has PCI expansion slots) and use that kind of video card?
Steve said 9 days later

Also tried last night to remove just the secondary display adapter. At first I thought it was working, because windows seemed to boot much further along, but then same issue. Dang. Headed home tonight to get a different video card, and will give it a shot again Monday night.
GJ said 9 days later

No, PCI Express are not compatible with PCI slots. :) Sorry! PCI Express is more modern than AGP, and like AGP, has a dedicated slot on the motherboard pretty much in the place where your AGP slot is now.

You've spent more time that I would have on this--at this point, I'm pretty sure it's a driver issue. I'd just rebuild the dang thing's OS. I can say that AGP drivers were the biggest pains in the ass since the days of DOS. I don't have nearly the same problems with newer PCI-E cards.
Steve said 9 days later

I'm giving it one more shot - swap out video cards. After that, yes, I'll rebuild the OS. I can just do a simple uninstall and reinstall, right? Will I need to reinstall all the programs that are currently installed? I don't want to format the drive, just uninstall and reinstall.

I really haven't spent that much time - I was gone from Friday through Wednesday. And I have my work laptop, and Parsla has her own laptop, so I'm not really missing it too much. Only thing I'm missing is downloading the latest Top Gear episodes, which I'll do tonight at my house using Parsla's old PC (which is installed at my house).
GJ said 10 days later

You could do a repair install of Windows first--that'd keep your apps.

What I was talking was a full install--which means, you wipe the drive and start fresh. Generally speaking, it's good to have a spare drive around so you can save all of the old drive so you don't later find a "whoops, I missed something!"
GJ said 10 days later

the repair install doesn't clean up the drivers much though--so I don't think it'll work, but it may be worth a first shot.
Steve said 10 days later

I do have two drives in this machine, but I think I foolishly installed all of my programs (MS Office, etc) on the same primary drive as the OS. If I have format the drive, I'll be putting all of the other programs on their own drive. Found two video cards here at home, a GeForce 2 Titanium and an ATI radeon All In Wonder, both 64 mb DDR. Pathetic compared to my 512mb ATI radeon XP1600 Pro that is causing me issues, but since I don't really play games on my computer (other than bejewled 2), It should work to help diagnose the problem.
Geoff said 11 days later

Drop ATI, and go Nvidia. I had nothing but problems with my ATI video cards (driver problems). Ever since I replaced them with Nvidia, everything has been going great. You can get a 512 AGP Nvidia card for dirt cheap. I've got an GeForce 7300GT that has been working great for me for a few years now.
GJ said 11 days later

Nice religious post, Geoff. I've had tons of problems with both Nvidia and ATI AGP cards, and the most stable AGP I ever ran was an ATI All in Wonder 9600XT. I have a couple of those babies lying around here, if you want one Steve. If you want a really unstable but fast and noisy AGP card, I have a Zogis (nvidia) 6800XT (256mb 128bit ddr2 memory). It's unstable as all hell but very powerful for an AGP card. Probably too powerful, thus the stability issues. Have lots of memory lying around that might fit your machine too, so let me know and I can send you all kinds of crap. Drives, too, but none are very big or very new. Figure on 40-60-80 mb sizes.

Now, fast forward to today, and I am having zero issues with my current Nvidia cards--one an 8800GT and the other a GT240 Superclock. OK, OK, I've seen a BSOD once in a while (oh yeah, bioshock would do that endlessly on the 8800GT) and KOTOR 1 and 2 are still unstable as all hell on ANY nvidia card, but other than that it's golden.
Geoff said 13 days later

Just going by my experience. I've owned a few of their cards, including an expensive FireGL. Had nothing but driver problems. No issue to date with either of my Nvidia cards that replaced them. I've got an 8800GT and works just fine. ATI simply doesn't support their cards as well. They refused to release a proper driver for the FireGL card for Windows Vista/7, which renders it useless. Quite dissatisfied with ATI. There are obviously some cheap versions of each which I could understand if they sucked. The FireGL card was supposed to be a premier workstation graphics card (I paid $650 for it). Had problems from the get go and now sits collecting dust. But that old bargain $40 nvidia card, works like a charm. Go figure. Go Nvidia.
GJ said 13 days later

LOL, you can run a FireGL in Vista/7. It's just not very straightforward because ATI didn't write an official driver. Think your biggest mistake was spending that much on a video card in the first place. :)

Trying to run an AGP card with Win 7 and/or Vista is silly, however. If you aren't into PCI-E land by then, you definitely don't want to be beyond XP. It's not so much the power of the graphics card, it's more that the mobo/chip is likely too old and slow to run either system sufficiently. Contrary to what some techs are saying, Win 7 is far heavier than XP.
Geoff said 13 days later

At the time that was the only dual DVI video card with sufficient memory to handle the 3D graphics and video I work with. It was indeed, a very poor purchase, I agree.

I can tell you no system can run Vista well. So just skip that one altogether. Win7 however runs quite nice. You are probably correct though that an old system with an AGP card should stick with XP. Still doesn't excuse ATI from writing a proper driver. It is especially difficult to try and fix the driver on your own, when you can't view your screen properly either :)
GJ said 13 days later

That's why you need 5-7 video cards lying around the house, like me!
Steve said 13 days later

Well, I have 3 video cards. Swapping out video cards did not help. Grumble. And of course I left my windows XP installation disk back at my house. So yes, GJ, I'm not about to reformat and reinstall. Yippee! As you said, should have done that a while ago. I just can't help myself in trying to figure out what went wrong. But last night, I came to the conclusion that I will never be able to figure out what went wrong.

My ATI card worked great for years. I can't complain one bit. I'm pretty sure it's not an ATI problem but something else screwed up my computer. Maybe I'll try my old GeForce2 titanium just to try a different brand (the old video card I tried yesterday was an old ATI A-I-W Radeon 7500 64 mb).
GJ said 14 days later

Well, given that it's not a hardware issue, and you've played with the drivers, Windows is definitely the cause. At the minimum, do a repair install. Worst case, do the full rebuild.
Steve said 18 days later

Grrrr. Reinstalled windows, formatted C drive, issue still persists.
GJ said 18 days later

Assuming this: format C drive, install windows, doesn't matter which video card, and you're still having issues. Monitor bad? That's pretty rare, but it happens. Have another one you can try?
Steve said 19 days later

But if the monitor were bad, why would it work in safe mode? I have one at my house, will be a while before I can try it.
GJ said 19 days later

safe mode runs in a lowest common denominator in terms of monitor abilities--640x480, 60hz, 16 colors. Your monitor may no longer be able to run in a higher mode. This is not uncommon if you're using a CRT monitor. While they last damn near forever, when they go they can lose their ability to operate at higher frequencies, which keeps you from using the resolution you probably have it set for in windows.

If you have a flat screen LCD monitor, this isn't likely the case since they operate on a totally different hardware implementation (in other words, they're not a cathode ray tube!).
Marc said 20 days later

Your video cards don't happen to require a power source do they? If so, the power supply can be an issue as well. Might only plug in the minimal hardware that is absolutely necessary to get the computer running and/or try a different power supply.