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[deejayry]

My friend recently bought a new HP A6657 pc which was in perfect working order when he got it, the only problem was that the included video card did not have a S-video output which he wanted to send the video signal to his TV in his lounge.

we decided the best way was to buy a new card with the S-video output to replace the existing one.

he fitted the card when it arrived but did not notice the additional power connector (to be fair there was no mention of it in the installation guide that came with the new card) when he powered on there was no display output, he tried to boot it a couple more times, then noticed the power cable in the box, he then fitted the cable and tried to boot again, this time it apeared to work, but when vista was running the display was in reduced resolution and colour depth.

He tried to install the driver on the cd and part way through got an error saying the msi service was not running.

after that he noticed there was no sound, his network card was marked as being disconnected (although there was still access to the network and internet) windows media player will not play any media (error about accsess rights)  and his antivirus software was playing up.

I've never failed to connect the extra power cable on a video card before so i dont really know what problems could be caused by it, i would have thought that it would just damage the video card, but the problems seem to be more widespread.


i have since re fitted the old video card and there dont apear to be any issues with the graphics, or driver. but the other problems still remain.

Any ideas on this guys? could failing to plug in the extra power to the video card have caused failure to any of the components on the motherboard? what about the software issues? most of them seem to be more like a virus is messing up the system but it seems strange that it all happened at the same time.

[I LOVE ED]

I've never had an ATI card before but have you tried using the current drivers from ATI?

Also, if the card has a DVI port, why not try using a DVI-HDMI adapter?  I'm thinking the TV-out drivers are messing up.

[pinkpanther]

1.  Not plugging in the extra power usually just means the system can't boot.  End of story; no hardware damaged.

2.  You probably have a set of half-installed corrupt drivers sitting out there.  If it is a Vista machine or you're lucky with XP, there is a system restore point just before install.  You should roll back to that point or attempt to uninstall the corrupt drivers.

The lesson here to learn is to always search for the latest, stable driver set before installing.  Look online for the latest set of drivers for ATI.  Those package driver discs (particularly from non-ATI vendors) get corrupted with bloatware and garbage all the time.

[MaxamusCrasious]

You could also boot into safe mode, open up the Hardware manager, bring up the properties for the card, and roll back the drivers from there, a wee bit easier than using system restore IMHO.

[deejayry]

Thanks for the replies guys

I've never had an ATI card before but have you tried using the current drivers from ATI?

Also, if the card has a DVI port, why not try using a DVI-HDMI adapter?  I'm thinking the TV-out drivers are messing up.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, my friend and I have been saying how good it would have been if we had thought of running a HDMI cable, but its too late now, we ran the cable through socket plates mounted on the walls with the rest of the mains outlets, cat 5, speaker cables for the surround system, CATV ect. at the time when we routed the cables HDMI had not really hit the market.

We found that on the pc it was not possible to install any programs that used the windows installer service, it apeared that some service that was depended on  by the windows installer service, sound card and network card services would not work. i tried several things to get the services working right but had no luck.

as the only apps my friend had really installed were opera, utorrent and microsoft office, it was easy enough to do a full system restore, once this was done we tried the new graphics card, the latest drivers installed and it all worked fine!

1.  Not plugging in the extra power usually just means the system can't boot.  End of story; no hardware damaged.

2.  You probably have a set of half-installed corrupt drivers sitting out there.  If it is a Vista machine or you're lucky with XP, there is a system restore point just before install.  You should roll back to that point or attempt to uninstall the corrupt drivers.

The lesson here to learn is to always search for the latest, stable driver set before installing.  Look online for the latest set of drivers for ATI.  Those package driver discs (particularly from non-ATI vendors) get corrupted with bloatware and garbage all the time.

1. ok, that makes sense, as everything is working now.

To be honest if i was with my friend when he installed the card i would have told him to get the drivers from the ATI site. however on looking at the disk included with the card it seemed the only thing on there was the ati driver with no added rubbish.