[Graphics problem] Computer turns ON one time out of ten

Hello everyone,

I have an annoying problem with my graphics card.

(The story:
My brother was repairing some businessman's computer, and he had to urgently replace the graphics card. So he installed the one from our home computer to the guy, and 'temporarily' installed the broken one to our computer. Turns out that the graphics card was better than ours, but it has a weird condition)

Most of the time, the computer won't turn on. You have to push the On/Off button, then wait.. then if the screen doesn't turn on, you turn the computer off, plug out the power supply and wait for all the lights to turn off. Then plug the cord back in and try again.
If you're unlucky, it takes up to 15 attempts to actually turn the computer on this way, tho sometimes it turns on on the first attempt, sometimes after a few tries etc.

If it DOES turn on successfully, I noticed the initial screen says "System running in Fail-safe state".

Other than this weird behavior, the graphics card works flawlessly.

Now, I'm wondering how I can force this piece of shit to run every single time, because it's really annoying if you get on a bad streak with your attempts.
(also, the computer is very old, so I'm not looking to invest in new hardware. The graphics card is GeForce 6600gt AGP)

Things I tried:
- loadin up bios setup, and reseting to fail safe defaults. It didn't help.


Thanks for reading, and hopefully for helping out.

- Ni7ee

 

Hi and welcome to MG... you say the rig is a bit on the old side.. what is the PSU wattage and is it sufficient for the Graphics Card .. cant find Ampage usage on Nvidia site ( as per usual) Look at the side of PSU and see what Ampage is on the 12 volt rail and is it sufficient to power the card. In the mean time I will try and find the amp usage, really bugs me this as these Big names never put ampage usage on the card specs which is most important. But firstly have you installed latest driver to be found here........
http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvista-32bit-275.33-whql-driver.html assuming you are running Win7 if not go back a page and choose your OS.

 

Hi, thanks for the reply.

Wattage is 550W.

Ampage on +12V is 25A.
As for finding out Video Card required ampage; is this stuff usually printed on the card itself? should I pull it out and try to find it?

I'm downloading drivers now even tho I doubt drivers are the problem because I assume proper drivers aren't needed for displaying basic stuff in the first few seconds on computer boot-up?

thanks

 

Yes having the most up to date drivers will certainly help if that is one of the issues. I spent a couple of hours last night trying to find out what the ampage requirement is for the card to no avail, but having said that 25amp and I would have thought would have been ample for this card. Incidentally does the motherboard have onboard graphics and if so does the same problem occur when screen connected???