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Brian McIntosh 2002-07-31 09:17
I have recently upgrades my xpsb600r (128 M memory, 600 MHz pIII) from win98se to XP home.
I had been using a RAGE2C pci card as my 2nd monoitor card, but I could not find an XP driver for it, so I purchased the Hercules card as mentioned in the subjest line. I wanted to use either the original NVIDIA GEFORCE 256 AGP card or the Herc card as the 2nd monitor. I am running into all sorts of problems. Here is what I have done so far ...
- tried the agp card as the primary and the Herc as the secondary - that seemed to work for a while. I was switching back and forth between the cards, selecting one as the primary and one as the 2nd card (from the desktop properties section). It was then the disaster started ... I would up rebooting and having the primary monitor come up as blank, whcih prevented me from doing anythgin.
- I then pulled the Herc PCI card out, and the system detected the AGP card and the system came back to life.
- I then set the bios to pick the PCI card as the primary and the Herc card came up first and worked OK. I then instaled the Nvidia AGP card and rebooted. The PCI card was detected OK as usual - used it to login to XP .... but the AGP driven screen was 1/2 green. When I tried to select the monitor as a second monitor through the desktop properties, it complained saying 'current selected graphics driver cannot be used - it was written for a prior version to windows'.
- I then downloadeed the latest dell NVIDIA driver and installed that ... no change. I went to the NVIDIA www site and got thier latrest driver ... no change.
- I then set the BIOS back to detect the AGP card forst .... but left the pci card (in the desktop properties section) to be the main graphics card. The system boots initially on the AGP card - shows the initial XP splash screen. It then switched to the PCI card where I select the user. All looks good ... right?
- I then goto the desktop properties to set the NVIDIA AGP card as an extension to the desktop, but the ONLY color resolution that is available is 4 bits (16 colors) and 600 X 480 resolution. When I select that card as the extension to the desktop, sure enough, I have a funky looking 16 color desktop extension!
Sorry for the long read, but I thought it would help understand what I did (or did wrong). Alng the way, I tried to remove the NVIDIA drivers by editing the registru and removing the NVIDIA entries as I saw on a web site soewhere. I then uninstalled the drivers and reinstalled, without much luck.
So, what do you think? Ditch the Herc card? Ditch the NVidia Card? Find a driver for the old Rage2C card? I really want to get my 2nd screen back, and was hoping someone could help.
Cheers,
Brian
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Nite 2002-07-31 17:51
"the Hercules card as mentioned in the subjest line."
emm.. what subject line?
\Nite - "can't rain all the time"
Multi-Monitor Gaming Web
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daniel 2002-07-31 23:24
Dunno if this helps but i found a way that works for me straight off on my xp system (after alot of dicking around)
To get my x2 graphics cards running under xp I installed the latest detonators for my AGP card...then reset....went into bios and set the initial display device to PCI (lots of people tend to have trouble under xp if it isnt apparently).....then i powered down, removed the AGP card and plugged in the PCI card.
Booted computer into windows running PCI card
only and made sure the PCI card didnt have a problem in device manager, then I shut down yet again and installed the AGP card also for a final bootup with both cards in.
On initial bootup my AGP run monitor displayed half a green screen like you said, but it worked straight off anyway, and hasnt done it again.
I also noted I couldnt get everything running properly if the PCI card was located directly below the AGP card, one card would always have a problem and "fail to start" according to windows.
I cant get my AGP card to work as a primary boot device no matter what i have tried unfortunatly, but within XP you can specify which graphics card u want to use as primary.....but this doesnt seem to be good enough for my midtown madness 2 game, which refuses to hardware accelerate at all with 2 graphics cards (but thats another story)
Hope this helps if you managed to follow my writing lol.
PS...i am using a geforce2mx400 with tvout, and a generic SIS pci card under xp pro
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