drivehard454

I bought a nvidia geforce 5500 fx 256mb video card for AGP slot. My ASUS mother board had an integrated ATI radeon 9200. I was told when I bought the card that it would work fine with my system. I could play GTA San Andreas ok before with a mild amount of choppiness. After installing the nvidia card, I can turn the graphics up and the game plays with no problems for about 4-5 min. Then the screen freezes. I can't do anything to stop it. After about 30 seconds the computer restarts by itself. This only seems to happen with GTA. I can run all my other games just fine. However I could run the other games at full performance before I installed the card also. My brother has a similar system and the exact same card and it plays perfect. I tried installing the latest driver but when i restart, the computer says it needs to resort to previous settings. Any ideas or suggestions? I have an asus mother board, 2.4 ghz athalon processor, 512 ddram, divided hard drive at 20 gig and 60 gig, 450 output power supply, windows xp

Erroneus

Try DriverCleaner, can be found in the menu at the frontpage.

Use drivercleaner to clean your system properly and the install the latest drivers. Make sure you have the newest DirectX installed.

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robomosk

Yeah, try Driver Cleaner. Switching between ATI and Nvidia leaves lots of trace stuff behind that can really screw with your system.

If that doesn't work, two things come to mind:

First, you might have a cheesy power supply that can't source enough juice to power the card. Is is a name-brand PSU (some top brands are Antec, OCZ, Enermax, ThermalTake), or whatever came with your no-name case? Second, you might have a busted card. Sorry, but it's possible.

The way to test both of these possibilities is to swap the card with your brother's indentical one and test them in each other's machines. If yours works in his machine, and vice versa, there's a more elusive problem. You may have to reinstall windows to fix it. If it's not the hardware, it's got to be the software, right?

If your machine doesn't run either card, it's probably the Power Supply. Spend $50 and get this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817103934.

If your card doesn't work in your brother's machine either, it looks like you bought a lemon. Send it back and buy this instead http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130064.

CDsDontBurn

Try some of these things and see if they help out.

Update your video card drivers, the 93.71 are the newest available.
Update your motherboard chipset drivers.
Update your motherboard BIOS.

@ robomosk: The PSU he has is a 450w PSU. 100w higher than the Antec 350 you showed. And the gfx card he has is an AGP, card. So the card you linked wouldn't be of any help to him either. And perhaps this fellow here was on a budget so that's why he got 5500?

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robomosk

Didn't realize about the agp thing, but about the PSU issue, a good 350W power supply is plenty to run the system he's got. 450W is overkill, and if he's got a crappy PSU, the wattage is irrelevant anyway. I've seen with my own eyes the difference. A friend bought a case off-the-shelf with a "450W PSU", and it woudn't even boot with a Pentium 4 3.0GHz. I had the power supply that I linked (Antec SmartPower 350W) laying around, so we put it in, and it worked no problem, even though the nominal power was lower. It wasn't that the PSU was broken either. We checked all the rails, and they were outputting the correct voltages. The thing was just a piece of junk and it couldn't supply enough current to feed the processor. The moral of this story is, don't believe the power ratings on cheap PSUs; they're probably wrong.

This is a good power supply, and if it turns out the power suppy is this guy's problem, it is the one I'd recommend to replace it.

CDsDontBurn

well, he never did state what kind of PSU it was. only that it was "450w". And i know all too well what you mean about cheapy PSUs.

BTW, what kind of PSU do you have drivehard?

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drivehard454

Ok, I tried the driver cleaner. I guess I am not understanding how it works. I went to control panel and deleted the ATI and nVidia drivers. I then unhooked the net cable and rebooted in safe mode. When in safe mode I cannot find the driver cleaner?? I restarted and I think windows instantly installed the ATI driver. I opened drive cleaner, there is a drop down menu. I click and there is a ton of stuff there. I selected ATI and ran it , then I selected nvidia and ran it. I then went online and downloaded the newest nvidia driver. I then tried my game and it still freezes. I looked to see if the ATI driver is in the add/remove but it is not there.

Anyways...... I looked at my power supply. I am wrong. It is 400w output. The brand is Powermax. I have a Celeron 2.4 gig cpu

Actually, I saw the card on ebay and through a lowball bid in right before the end. Got it for only $40 bucks, new. I knew that it was the same as my brother had so I figured it would work fine with my system. He can play that game and Doom 3 just fine. The only difference between his and mine is that he bought a Nvidia mother board. I am not an avid gamer, but sometimes I like to sit down and play. I dont really have a lot of the newest games and know that I will probaly have to ugrade soon to keep up. But there is no reason why this card shouldnt work for GTA SA. BTW I can't really swap with my brother, we live about 5 states away.

I think I am babbling now. Thanks for all the advice. I would like to buy whatever I need to upgrade, but I am in a real money pinch right now for a while.

robomosk

DriverCleaner is pretty finicky about how it works, so you really have to follow the directions closely. You definitely need to boot into safe mode and run it from there. The reason windows is automatically installing the ATI drivers is because you can't delete all the files unless you're in safe mode. You could find all the files manually and delete them (basically just search for the term ati and delete everything you find), but driver cleaner takes care of that for you.

I don't know why you couldn't see the program from safe mode. How did you boot into safe mode? Assuming you run WinXP, the way to do it is to run msconfig.exe by typing "msconfig" in to the Run window (you should be able to find that on the Start Menu), then on the General tab, click "diagnostic startup", then click OK. It should ask you to restart. Say yes. When it boots back up, every thing should still be on your desktop, including Driver Cleaner. It definitely won't work unless you run it from safe mode, so keep trying.

drivehard454

I screwed up again. It is a powmax not powermax.

I have been searching google for info on the powmax brand psu's. I am getting mixed results. Some say they are good units, Others say they are under what they are rated for.

I guess it's gonna have to wait till I get some xtra cash and buy a different one and hope that was the problem.

Could it have anything to do with only having 512 RAM

What do you guys think. Could that be what's causing the game to freeze and shut the computer down? I can run warcraft III, GTA VC, and Wolfenstien just fine with the settings up all the way. I even tried to turn down the settings on GTA SA, still did not help.

Thanks

drivehard454

Thanks robomosk I will try tomorrow. Getting late. I was starting in safe mode by hitting F8 during reboot.

Also, how exactly do I go about running the driver cleaner? There are nine different things with ATI in the drop down menu. Do I need to select each of them and run the cleaner nine times? Same with the 5 nvidia ones. Or am I just looking it wrong. Sorry, some things I'm a bit slow at picking up

robomosk

Yeah, you'll want to run it for each of the ati items, just to make sure it gets every last bit of stuff.

Don't rush out to buy anything just yet. Let's make sure it's not a software problem first. It almost always is.

CDsDontBurn

I used to sell Powmax PSUs at my old job. They were what we called "good" PSUs. In the sense that all they provided the user with was a system to be powered, and not much else.

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drivehard454

Great, now I did it. I ran everything the way you suggested. Went through diagnostic start-up, ran all the ones with ATI and nvidia. I then switched back to normal start up. When the computer rebooted it came to the screen which says settings have changed and and then give the options for: Normal start, Start with previous settings, and three different safe mode starts. I have tried all of them and it shuts down and comes right back to that screen everytime. I tried powering down with the same effect. I tried to hit F8 and I get the start with whatever drive I want and it still goes to that screen. Did I somehow delete a windows start driver by accident? I don't have a windows xp start-up disc. This is an unregistered version of xp. I do have a window xp pro disc, I don't know if that will help. I do not know what to do, and like I said I do not have the funds for this particular project.Am I screwed? I am on my old comp right now, took a while to get it fired up but it's working. Talk about slow. 450 mgbAny suggestions how I can get past that screen? Should I post another thread on this issue?Thanks guys

robomosk

It looks like you've found a new problem. I'd post this in the motherboards forum, because you may have gone beyond a graphics problem now. Although this new turn of events is making me lean towards a hardware problem. I can't think of anything you could have done to mess up the windows startup that badly. You say you can't even get into safe mode?

drivehard454

Right. robomosk. Like I said, first I went to RUN and typed msconfig and selected diagnostic start-up. After it started in safe mode, I opened driver cleaner. At the start of the drop down menu, I ran the driver cleaner on that first by accident. I dont remember exactly what it was 3D.. something. After that I just went to each one with ATI in it and ran the cleaner and then to each one with nvidia. I then ran the cab cleaner. Then I went back to control panel and checked to see if the drivers were still listed. They were not. Then I went to RUN and typed in the msconfig and selected the normal start-up option. The computer shut down and restatered and came to a screen that said some setting have changed and gave a selection like Start windows normally, Start windows with previous settings or safe mode. I selected start normally and it shut down, and came back to that screen, I then selected start with previous settings, same thing. Then I tried each of the three safe mode options, smae thing. I even tried F8 during reboot, same screen. I tried shutting power down. After all that I brought my relic computer to life so I could get back online. I posted a thread in windows forum. You think I should put another in hardware? Thanks for keeping in touch.

Tipstaff

What motherboard do you have, drivehard? You mentioned that it was an Asus board with an integrated ATI Radeon 9200 graphics chip. Would it be the P4R800-VM? If so then it should be noted that this board is running an ATI 9100 IGP chipset. This is important to know, btw.

The reason? Well, you may have made a huge mistake when you ran Driver Cleaner. There are 2 important listings in Driver Cleaner that you should not run unless you intend to move the drive to another machine: the ATI IGP and nForce chipset listings. Both of these two listings are related to the chipset. While the nForce listing wouldn't have been a problem, the ATI IGP one is for sure one to leave alone. If you cleaned out this listing you may have cleaned out the drivers that Windows uses to run your board. Specifically, the chipset drivers relating to the IDE controller, and so fourth. Normally this wouldn't be too much of a problem as Windows would load a standard driver, however, you also mentioned you cleaned out the cab listings, which means the default drivers for certain devices are gone.

How to fix this? Normally I would say to either wipe the drive, and reinstall the operating system, or try a reinstall by way of a repair (not the first repair that pops up during the installation, but the 2nd one that will pop up when you choose to install Windows, and it will then detect a previous OS asking you to either delete it, or repair it) over top of the OS installed already. However, in both cases you need a legit OS to do this (at least due to forum rules, this is the only thing I can describe... sorry).

One long shot to try would be to remove the 5500 card, and run off the integrated VGA again, as well as remove any PCI devices. This will remove devices that Windows may be trying to find drivers for. Also, if there are any options in the bios for onboard lan/audio, turn them off. If there is a way to disable the Secondary IDE channel, do that too (of course, be sure to move your optical drive as a slave on the Primary channel so that you can at least get access to it, otherwise you won't be able to install anything off a CD). The idea is to change the system enough to force Windows to readjust what drivers it's loading. It may be just enough to get you back into Windows so that you can reload your motherboards chipset drivers, and get you back into recovering from this.

BTW, I know I'm jumping in a bit late, but one option I didn't see mentioned about getting the 5500 working was to turn off AGP Fast Writes. If you get the system up and running again take a look at disabling this option to see if that helps. Or, you could also try using some of the modded drivers as this option is usually disabled automatically with some of them. However, if you are using modded drivers already, or have turned that option off already as well, then I would suggest trying to turn AGP Fast Writes on as some cards need it to run (it just depends on the video card, and the motherboard it's running in).

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robomosk

Does driver cleaner actually allow you to delete the default system drivers like that? I had no idea. That doesn't seem like a very nice feature. The way windows handles default drivers has always been one of its saving graces. It's not clear from the DriverCleaner website, but I don't think that's what cab cleaner does. I think it just removes the ATI files from the cab archives, which just are backups of the drivers installed the last time the system was updated (like during a service pack install). I don't think the generic IDE drivers got removed as part of the IGP removal. The system should be able to function without the motherboard specific drivers, just like it would before you installed them if you were reinstalling windows.

My inkling is that windows doesn't know what which display adapter to use since there are two plugged in (the AGP card and the integrated ATI adapter). I don't think we ever mentioned disabling the onboard graphics in the bios (hopefully there's an option for this).

Anyway, the point is, I'm not sure what's going on, but resetting the bios like Tipstaff said is the first step you have to take. Get into the bios, reset it to default settings (it should say quite clearly how to do this), then make the changes Tipstaff described. You definitely will want to give up on getting the Nvidia card to work right now. Pull that thing out for the moment.

If you do get back into Windows, the first thing you will want to do is get the CD that came with the motherboard and reinstall all the drivers. Once you get that done, we'll look into how exactly to get a separate video card running on a machine with intergrated graphics, which is clearly not trivial.

I agree with trying the FastWrites thing. That feature was originally intended just for Nvidia cards, maybe for this express purpose.

drivehard454

Thanks guys for not giving up. You are right tipstaff, it is the ATI 9100, I mistyped. I am getting help from another source also. He mentioned hooking up a formatted hard drive and loading my xp pro windows, then hooking the previous drive as a slave and I should be able to access that way also. I wish I could just wipe the drive and start over, but I have some important stuff on there that I can't lose, for taxes. I never should have combined my business in with game playing on one system just for this reason. But, what's done is done and I need to try to fix and learn. I have a version of xp pro sp2 disc, but the version on the computer is a regular xp sp3.

The info you guys gave me is a little much for this amature to take in but, I catch on fairly quick, and am kind-of looking forward to the challange.

Tipstaff

BTW, something that just dawned on me is that Driver Cleaner makes a backup of any files it cleans out (default directory is C:\Program Files\Driver Cleaner PE\Backup\with the date of the cleaning). Inside there you should see 3-4 folders, and each has a purpose. One is a backup of the ATI driver setup folder, 2 file backups (one specifically for Windows files), and another holds registry listings.

Since you are on the road to using another install of Windows on a different hard drive as a way to recover the files on the original one, you might conisder copying back the files that Driver Cleaner backed up. You won't be able to recover the registry listings, but you can at least copy back the Windows\INF, Windows\Prefetch, and Windows\System32 folders to see if that at least gets the older Windows install working again.

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drivehard454

Thanks for the info. I will give it a try. I am waiting for my other HD to come. Should be here this weekend.

drivehard454

Ok, I hooked up my new HD and unhooked the old one. I put my windows xp pro cd in the CDROM and removed my nvidia card. I start and go to BIOS start-up and switched boot to CDROM first, HD, second and floppy third. I save and it reestarts and I get a screen:NTLDR is missingPress Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart. I do this and it comes right back to the same screen.I have tried a few combinations. I even tried to do this with the old HD. Then I get the screen "Sorry for the inconvienence your system detected changes " And gives the same options as before, to restart normally, restart with revious settings, and safe mode. Every one I select takes me back to that screen.I also just noticed that my mouse is not working. It lights up with the computer. I plugged it in to this one and t works, so it's not the mouse. Why would that stop working?Any ideas? thanks