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.