Graphics Card & Modem Card Fail (25th May 2009)
My PC was failing to boot today. Called a local PC repairer and described the symptoms. It was emitting one long beep, then three short beeps. This means the graphics are faulty.
He came over the same day and swapped out the graphics card for a really old spare he had. It now boots fine. So now I just need to buy a new graphics card.
Failure to Boot (28th May 2009)
The PC now cycles through the below sequence a few times, then goes no further:
- Power on.
- Fans spin up.
- Reads all drives.
- Single, normal beep.
- Resets.
Repairer talked me through the checks he would have made. We got to the stage of unplugging the peripheral cards to see which was faulty. This looked like a two-handed job, so I’d call him back when it was done.
Strangely, it would only boot up when the modem card was removed. A card we don’t even use, since the Internet plugs into our network card. This means I can simply unplug it and continue working, which is a neat and simple fix.
Bought New Graphics Card (3rd June 2009)
After much hunting and being outbid in the final seconds on eBay, eventually got an nVidia GeForce 6600 for £30. I had asked the seller to offer a Buy it Now after my bidding woes and he agreed. It should be here in a few days.
Hopefully it will have better OpenGL support. The new GTA 2 level editor and the newlevel viewer are using that. The viewer ran deathly slow and was completely untextured. Even the most chaotic scenes in GTA 2 run smooth as silk at 1600×1200. It even ran normal scenes in GTA 3 nicely.
So, my feeling is that OpenGL sucks at some level.
Received New Graphics Card (5th June 2009)
Well-wrapped in cardboard and a sheet of those plastic air bubble things. It has an on-board fan a 4-pin power plug.
Plugged it in, turned it on and jumped through the New Hardware Detected! hoops. It appeared to hang for several minutes while a spyglass orbited over an orange folder. It was only by looking at the lights on my modem that I figured it was downloading drivers without a progress bar. No way to know that from the UI, which looked entirely like it had stalled whilst searching for drivers in an unresponsive online database, though.
Anyway, eventually got those installed. Vaguely recall Device Manager saying these were the something like 17x.xx. Driver Cleaner has deprived you of precise trivia, in this case. The important thjing is, stuff doesn’t work quite right.
Downloaded latest drivers (185.85) and…stuff still doesn’t work. This should have been a modest but useful step up from the nVidia 6200, which had worked fine except with the new editor prototypes.
So I entered the pit of nVidia driver hell.
Erasure! (7th June 2009)
On the 2nd day (yes, day!) I installed and ran a utility called Driver Sweeper to ensure all traces of a previous driver had been removed. This utility erased the entire NVIDIA folder, including all my screenshots and notes of application incompatibility from other drivers I’d tried!!
It also removed the installers for several drivers I had downloaded but not yet even installed. These had been recommended on the nVidia forum or by the websites of computer repairers. Hours and hours of searching followed by even more hours and hours of downloaded.
Waste. Of. Time.
Catastrophic Advice
One guide recommended updating the chipset drivers. A utility called CPU-Z told me mine were ALi/ULi, which apparently has something to do with nVidia. The guide recommendeds using the most recent version, regardless of the chipset. So that’s what I installed.
The installer says it will figure out what your system needs to have installed. The list had 1 item, which was ticked and said ULi PCI to AGP Controller. So that’s what I installed.
BIG MISTAKE!
There’s a lot of rebooting I haven’t been telling you about. Usually restarted me at 640×480×16. Usually I could drag the slider to the right number of pixels in Display Properties and set the colour depth again. 1,600×1,200×32 ftw, imho.
But this time, it was 640×480×4 with 20-pixel-wide bands of dappled inverted and dead colour running vertically across the entire screen. NOOOOO!!
Thankfully I had the initiative to use Device Manger, open the System devices branch and open the ULi PCI to AGP Controller. From here I used Roll Back Driver. After yet another restart, the banding was gone and I could select sane display modes.
Phew!
Looking in Device Manager it says the thing is ALi, not ULi. So why did the installer install anything?!
Workable…Kinda (8th June 2009)
Eventually I found an adequate level of brokenness using the 94.24 drivers to do a bit of work and gaming:
- GTA 2
- Runs fine.
- GTA 2 Level Editor
- Runs fast but has red flickering above all ground-level surfaces.
- Windows Media Player
- Blank, green screen.
Sigh.
Back to the Future (8th June 2009)
Eventually I gave up trying to make this card play ball. Replaced it with the ancient ATi card the computer repairer had lent me. The drivers had been found and installed automatically. It worked immediately this time, so I guess its drivers were still lying dormant somewhere it re-activated them. Clever thing.
This is a 128MB card while the GeForce 6 series cards were 256MB. Yet this seems almost as fast as the 6200 when it worked perfectly and displays the levels perfectly, unlike the flickering red mess of the 6600.
Wasting £30 on a card I can’t use is bitterly disappointing. But I can buy this card from the PC repairer for £5. That’s a bargain for something which actually works! (I don’t play 21st-Century games on the PC.)
All I can conclude is that ATi know what they are doing better than nVidia and the Internet combined.
History of System Upgrades
This PC was delivered to us in October 2001, with this original specification:
| Price | £1,043 |
|---|---|
| Motherboard | Asus A7A266 (266MHz AGP Pro/4×) |
| CPU | AMD Athlon 1400XP |
| Memory | 512MB DDR SDRAM |
| Graphics | 64MB nVidia GeForce 3 |
| Hard Drive | 60GB |
| Monitor | LG Flatron 915FT Plus 19″ |
During its 8 years of service so far, we’ve replaced:
- Memory while under warranty, therefore free.
- Hard drive in April 2007, which was very worrying.
- Power supply in April 2009.
- Graphics card in June 2009.
| Memory | 512MB DDR SDRAM |
|---|---|
| Graphics | 256MB nVidia GeForce 6200 |
| 256MB nVidia GeForce 6600 | |
| 128MB ATi Radeon 9200SE | |
| Hard Drive | 120GB |