Have a pc that is doing something strange that i've never seen. When I turn it on, it takes about 5 min to boot up, also, I have no video and the light on the monitor blinks as if there is no video signal unitl i get to the logon screen. after I logon everything is normal and it operates as if nothing was ever worng. I leaning towards this being a hardware issue. When it on I can't see the dell splash screen or where it says "Press F1 to enter setup, cuz it seems there is no video display. Specs: Dell Dimension 2400 2.2 Ghz Celeron Cpu 256MB Ram Win XP SP2
strange problem, did anything change before this started to happen e.g. new hardware installed etc? when you startup the computer keeping pressing F1 and see if you end up at the setup screen then.
This is very wierd but I have two guesses that might help. First of all have you tried turning on the monitor a few minutes before turning the computer on? It could be just that the monitor is taking a long time to "warm up" so doesn't show anything for a few minutes. Turn the monitor on a few minutes before the computer and see if that changes anything. My other guess is that BIOS's generally allow for the video output to be sent either to the AGP bus or the PCI bus. If you have a monitor attached to an AGP card but configure the BIOS to send the output to the PCI bus then you won't see anything on the monitor even if all the parts are in working order. In this case then maybe you only see something on the screen when Windows starts up, loads the AGP drivers, and redirects the output to the AGP bus. To get around that you could try putting a PCI card into the computer and see of you get any output on that at boot-time or simply clear the BIOS which will normally use the AGP bus by default. Of course I'm assuming you are using an AGP card and not a PCI one but note that on-board graphics ports usually use the AGP bus.
