For some reason odd reason, I think my video card is having serious problems. I reformatted my computer and installed Windows XP. I tried installing the latest nvidia drivers (43.45) and everything goes fine during the installation and I restart the computer as optioned. During the restart, the bios loads and XP starts to load, but then the monitor goes in standby mode, but I can still hear the music load in XP. I have no other option but to power off the system. It takes several tries just to get the bios to start again. When the bios does load, I start Windows in Safe Mode, but the screen is all garbled. After I do the system restore, everything is back to "normal."
When I attempt to install the latest agp driver (1.14), the screen begins to become slightly garbled, but my screen is still displayed at 1280x1024. When I restart the computer everything boots fine, until it gets to loading windows where the scrolling bars become messed up. Windows then loads in another setting and the screen is once again garbled. I've pretty much learned to restore my computer without having to look at the screen.
Today I decided to stop being lazy and test the card on my parents computer. They have a MSI-845G Max card with onboard video. I plugged the Asus Ti4200 in the AGP slot and when I went to turn on the computer, it starts but doesn't boot and the monitor goes in standby mode. As soon as I unplug the card and hook the video cable back to the onboard video everything works fine again.
I went in the bios and changed the Graphics Adapter Priority setting from AGP/Int-VGA to PCI/Int-VGA just in case the computer recognizes it as a PCI card. With the setting at PCI/Int-VGA, the computer boots up, but then the monitor goes into standby, the same as on my computer. Does this mean the card is bad? Or did I miss a step when hooking it up to a computer with onboard video?