A weird situation here?! A Dimension 4600 with NVidia GeForce FX 5200 video card, windows XP Pro connected to a dell LCD display.
Won't boot normally - you get the windows splash screen, then screen goes to sleep (yellow light) and screen is dark.
Boots / runs fine in safe mode
WOund up uninstalling the fx 5200 in hardware. Machine then boots up in normal mode... windows detects the 5200 and then the screen starts blanking out or going completely asleep.
I disabled the device completely and now it boots up in normal mode with no screen blanking (sometimes it would wake back up, most times goes dark completely).
Downloaded the dell drivers rom their webiste dated from 2004 for the machine and try to install it. It says the card is disabled, do I want to enable it (you have to to do the install)... once you enable it the screen starts going black before you can finish the install. Tried installing in safe mode and you get some errors and back in normal mode, if the card is enabled, it keeps blanking out.
So with card disabled, things seem fine, although refresh is a bit slow and some web pages seem like they aren't displaying correctly.
Some questions:
So the card is disabled... but I am still connected to it and still using it (and actually, can still change resolution under display properties). I would have thought the screen would be black since the card is disabled?!
It seems like a software problem? Boots in safe mode OK, boots in normal mode with video card disabled in hardware properties, but it is still supplying the video OK
How do I get back to using the card!? Or how do I use the DB-15 / analog video that's integrated on the motherboard? There's a connector there, but it came from Dell with a black cap on it (since you are supposed to use the better video card, not that one? I don't see it in windows hardware devices and I don't see a setting in Bios to enable it....
THANKS!
