- Apr 5, 2001
- 1,155
- 1
- 81
I'm having a very obscure video card problem that I would like to solve.
I was given a free Sony Vaio P4 2.533GHz minitower computer, 1GB DDR, 100GB HDD. I threw a cheap SATA card in it and use it for cloning drives and running old hardware off its parallel port. The computer is running Windows 7 x86.
Anyway, my brother-in-law needed a video card in a pinch, so I gave him the AGP MX440 card out of my Vaio since it's mainly just a spare that I use once in-awhile.
Problem 1: I have an old ATI X1300/X1550 32-bit PCI video card, threw it in my Vaio, and when I drop into the desktop, it's a black screen with mouse pointer. Windows 7 has built-in WDDM drivers for the video card. I can get to the desktop if I boot into safe mode and go into the registry to disable Aero. However, it is SUPER DUPER SLOW, completely unusable. It's not because the card is PCI, because it used run the 3rd and 4th monitors flawlessly at work before they upgraded me to an iMac. It worked great and supported Aero then, but at home on my Vaio, it's terrible and Aero results in black screen. I also tried the latest legacy 10.2 drivers, but no improvement. I wondered if the poor performance is due to the card not grabbing an IRQ, it is showing IRQ as (-2).
Problem 2: Due to the above problem, I tried using a spare MSI-brand ATI HD 6450 PCIe card that I picked up for $10AR, and using a spare PCIe to 32-bit PCI adapter. It works fine, until the driver is installed. Then it hangs at "Welcome". The hard-drive light still flashes, so it's doing something, but won't get past that. I tried both 14.1 driver and the one before it. Neither worked. The card works fine plugged into a real PCIe slot in another PC, so I know it's not the card. I know it's not the PCIe-to-PCI adapter, because it works perfectly with my MSI GTX460 card and the latest 335.23 nVidia drivers (albeit with reduced performance).
Any ideas on things I could try for either problem?
I was given a free Sony Vaio P4 2.533GHz minitower computer, 1GB DDR, 100GB HDD. I threw a cheap SATA card in it and use it for cloning drives and running old hardware off its parallel port. The computer is running Windows 7 x86.
Anyway, my brother-in-law needed a video card in a pinch, so I gave him the AGP MX440 card out of my Vaio since it's mainly just a spare that I use once in-awhile.
Problem 1: I have an old ATI X1300/X1550 32-bit PCI video card, threw it in my Vaio, and when I drop into the desktop, it's a black screen with mouse pointer. Windows 7 has built-in WDDM drivers for the video card. I can get to the desktop if I boot into safe mode and go into the registry to disable Aero. However, it is SUPER DUPER SLOW, completely unusable. It's not because the card is PCI, because it used run the 3rd and 4th monitors flawlessly at work before they upgraded me to an iMac. It worked great and supported Aero then, but at home on my Vaio, it's terrible and Aero results in black screen. I also tried the latest legacy 10.2 drivers, but no improvement. I wondered if the poor performance is due to the card not grabbing an IRQ, it is showing IRQ as (-2).
Problem 2: Due to the above problem, I tried using a spare MSI-brand ATI HD 6450 PCIe card that I picked up for $10AR, and using a spare PCIe to 32-bit PCI adapter. It works fine, until the driver is installed. Then it hangs at "Welcome". The hard-drive light still flashes, so it's doing something, but won't get past that. I tried both 14.1 driver and the one before it. Neither worked. The card works fine plugged into a real PCIe slot in another PC, so I know it's not the card. I know it's not the PCIe-to-PCI adapter, because it works perfectly with my MSI GTX460 card and the latest 335.23 nVidia drivers (albeit with reduced performance).
Any ideas on things I could try for either problem?