XP Pro hangs with 2 video cards - Printer conflict?

Compaq DC5100 with an older nvidia TNT card in a pci slot, onboard video also "enabled", Win XP Pro, latest updates etc. All this worked swell and numerous reboots for check went ok. last thing I did was get an older Lexmark 2600 series printer working. it worked, the dual monitors worked, life was good. Shut down the system. came back two days later and WinXP would hang while loading up... never made it past the "watch and wait" screen... Remove the Nvidia card and it boots normal.

where is the bootlog? how do I dig in to see what is conflicting and halting the boot cycle?? Any issues with Lexmark's software that you guys know of?

thx

 

More than likely zapp it's because you're trying to run dual monitors using a video card and onboard video. The motherboard is designed to use either onboard video or a video card if it is present. If you want to have dual monitors you need a video card with two outputs. To get your computer to use the video card instead of onboard go into the bios and disable the onboard video. Hope this helps and if you need instructions on how to do any of this just let me know.

 

I get mixed up with the abbreviations, but any card with vga, and dvi connections will run two monitors, but the dvi connection needs to have a dvi to agp adaptor(only cost a couple of pounds, avilable at most pc suppliers)
As padams says, on board vga must be disabled for Windows to look for agp first, when it starts up. Ifeel that when you were restsarting each time, it skips the main boot, so that when you tried it from normal startup, Windows got confused, and did'nt know which to us.I have seen this happen when someone puts a graphics card in, and starts up without disabling on board graphics. You are always instructed to disable on-board graphics, by the graphicscard manufacture, usually in the set up instructions.

 

OK, got 'er fixed.

on these later model compaq business class machines they made allowance for onboard to be enabled, instead of just assuming you want it 'off' with adjunct vid card [which was a stoopid assumption but they are not alone].
I'm not 100% sure why XP was choking on it but the fix was that in a later ver. of the bios [i think its 1.08] which I updated to, they added one more switch. In addition to the already-present "Enable/Disable" of onboard, they added another to let you pick whether the onboard vid would also be the boot vid source. Once I put "yes" to this question it all worked. Now, one would assume that the presence of such an option implies that the system will work regardless~!! right? but it would not. at least not with Win XP Pro... maybe linux or other .

so I'm running two displays now happily: one on the onboard, the other on a PCI card nvidia...

 

Great, it's good to know it will work, and by showing how you solved it,and the full explanation, which contradicts most arguements for video card installation, you help others with a similar setup. I learned a new one , here , too -- must remember it.
Anyone else know other motherboards with this setup ??

 

Wow! I had no idea that would work. Onboard and videocard together. I guess you really do learn something everyday on MG. Well glad to hear it's working.