Video card installation issues

A friend bought an ATI Radeon 9250. He's not a big gamer or anything and just wanted a card that would be capable of playing games for his daughter (which required a card with directX 8.1 support) and wanted help installing it into his 3 yr old HP desktop. I think it was a Pavillion XV998 2.18 MHz Pentium 128 RAM.

Anyway the mobo has onboard video. We install the new card boot the box and the screen comes up. Install the catalyst drivers and when Windows loads the screen is black with exception to the mouse cursor. Over the course of the next few hours we uninstall\install every catalyst driver version we can find. All produce the same.

Take the Radeon card back to store and get a NVidia GeForce card. Same behavior. Place card in - windows boots up and can see the screen (with exception of the taskbar). Load drivers, reboot, screen is black. wtf.

Do I need to disable the onboard video for this to work. I didn't have time to try that and figured I'd ask the experts before my return visit.


Thanks in advance for any ideas\help\info.

Do you get a menu when you right click the desktop?

if yes then you are probably running in dual monitor mode with your onboard video providing output to the primary display.

You can either disable the onboard video or set the monitor attached to the new video card as primary, and disable extending the desktop to the other monitor. (Display Proporties on the settings tab).

It'd be weird though because dual monitor support generally resets to single monitor mode if any video changes are detected by windows.

I'd take a look in the BIOS and look around for "Init display first: (PCI/AGP/etc...)" and make sure AGP is selected and also, as liggy suggested, see if you can simply disable the onboard card in the BIOS.