My girlfriend bought an old pc that has on board graphics, it used to run fine it has 256MB RAM and the on board graphics was using 32MB of it. I went into the bios and set it to 0MB and now whenever the PC boots, there are just black and white vertical lines across the screen- you can't see anything at all, but you can hear Windows booting up, I wondered if I have damaged the on board graphics, or if putting an AGP one in it will work and automatically override the on board one? I tried taking the bios battery out and leaving it to reset it, but it doesn't work I can't get into the bios or anyting as I can't see anything I hope someone can help
as you probably know, onboard grx are usually crap, so, either try re-enableing the onboard grx, by resetting the BIOS or inserting a grx card, apparently, you have tried resetting the BIOS which failed, yes, you may have removed the battery, but, you didn't specify how long you removed it for, traditionally, the BIOS is reset by moving the BIOS reset jumper to pins 2 & 3 from pins 1 & 2 for 10 seconds, but, on rare occasions the BIOS keeps some residual power & can be fixed by moving the jumper to pins 2 & 3 for an hour Edit: some manufacturers make mobos automatically disable the onboard grx when a grx card is detected, BTW: what is the mobo Make & Model ?
Why would you set it to 0MB? lol. But yeah, you have to keep that CMOS battery out for a good period of time, it doesn't just reset. Personally, I would use the jumper method Dokey mentioned as it is the best way. Since your only running 256MB of ram total I'm guessing this is an old junky system on Win 98/2k. I doubt that your mobo will automaticall disable onboard VGA when putting an AGP card in.
Ok I left the battery out for about 2 mins I was told it only takes about 1 minute for the bios to reset- it did in my pc lol yea it's just an old pc for my g/f to use for browsing the web on its a plain AMD Athlon (not sure about m/b), I will try leaving the battery out for longer I just want the 0MB to go back to 32- I only tried setting it to 0 to see what it would do, but I can't acess the bios or anything as I cant see, which was why I was hoping it would automatically use the AGP slot over on board, I tried guessing the bios buttons but it won't do anything the only one I know that works is save and exit, reset to defaults don't seem to work- my mates giving me an old AGP card so I'll try that with leaving the battery out and let you know, thanks for the help
