Geforce 4 MX 420 help desperately needed!

[lilbpaw]

I have just built 2 systems. The first which works great.
The second is driving me crazy.
My main problem is the Geforce 4 MX PCI video card that I installed.
When I boot up the system, Windows Xp will recognize the card and install the drivers. It looks great, but when I reboot, all goes crazy. It goes through the normal boot up, however, I will only (sometimes) see the task bar flash then disappear. Then the background is blue. No icons ever appear. It is like it is hanging before they all load up.
I see no mouse pointers, no icons, nothing.
If I push ctl-alt-del nothing happens. I have to restart it manually.
At this point I can go into safe mode and uninstall it and start the process over.
If I choose a generic vga driver it will have the yellow exclamation point but it will work fine.
I have tried downloading the newest drivers, the older drivers, going to windows update and downloading thier MS drivers. Same thing!
I know this card is good as it will work in 2 other computers just fine.
I have also exchanged the motherboard for a new mother board.
I can get an older voodoo 3 card to work in it fine.
Help please. What did I miss or over look?
This is only the 3rd system i have built. The other 2 were great.
My specs are:
KK266plus-r IWILL motherboard
1048 sdram (2 - 512 sticks)
1.5 ghz processor
1 - 4x dvd player
1- tdk 40x burner
Geforce 4 MX 420 video card - PCI
1 - 60 gig hd
1 - 40 gig hd

Any help would be great! thanks

 

[dinosnake]

We will have to go over many things, but I have been getting a lot of people with problems regarding WinXP's IRQ sharing. WinXP wants to assign everything to IRQ9 and then 'load balance' - it's too damm bad that you can't load balance a vid card or a 100BaseT NIC because of their bandwidth usage.

Does Microsoft understand or care?? Nooooo

See if your vid card, after installing the proper drivers, is indeed IRQ sharing with another card. Also remember that the AGP slot and the first PCI slot, right next to it, are usually hard-wired together in the motherboard to use the same resources - so Windows won't have a choice but to resource share if you have two devices installed in those slots.

We'll start here and go on.

Good luck to all of us... Your mileage may vary...

 

[lilbpaw]

Thanks.. I moved it off of the last pci slot. Well with slight results.. it is not on irq 9 and win xp did manage to boot up with icons now.
But with moments of booting up, I am experiancing lock ups.
I am not so sure that the lock ups are due to the video card.
I am rechecking everything.
My computer is still not responding as quick as it would like.
I must mention, for the geforce 4, because of the lock ups, I told win xp it was a geforce 2 and used mx100/200.
It was massively slower but no freezes yet until i can figure out the issue..
video card or not video card? hmmmmm

Lilbpaw

 

[dinosnake]

You probably want to move the video card to either the first or second PCI slot - this may be the reason for the slowness. On many motherboards only the first few PCI slots are bus-master DMA capable - the others are not. If that is true of your motherboard the video card can not do DMA programmed transfers, only PIO, which is incredibly slower as the main CPU must handle all transfers.

If you have any BIOS settings regarding PCI streaming / bursting / bus mastering make sure they are turned on and set properly for the correct slot the video card ends up in.

You also may wish to remove all other cards in the system until we figure out the video problems to eliminate as many non-relevant errors as possible.

What kind of lockups? If the system is coming back with ANY error reports I need to know them - the VxD reported during those errors is very important. Or does the system just freeze completely with no operation at all?? And how long does that lockup take, exactly? Do you get to do anything before the lockup? Your mileage may vary...