motherboard or monitor? i'm not sure

[Sephiroth]

this one stumped me... i'm pretty sure the video card (well, motherboard as it's integrated), is going south, but I'm not positive

was working on a pc, and they were playing medal of honor on a really old machine and didn't pay attention to the specs, it was a 166mhz k6-2 / 8 megs integrated video, and win98 crashed, obviously

he rebooted the machine, and windows wouldn't start, kernel32.dll / explorer kept crashing, wouldn't even start in safe mode, so i went over there, backed up what he needed from dos, and booted off my 2k cd to install

all went well through the text part of setup, until it rebooted to the graphical part. the best way i can describe it, you know how the monitor blinks on and off when 2k / xp setup is detecting your agp / pci bus, card, and monitor? well, his kept doing that, from the second it loaded the 2k booting up screen all the way through hardware detection and i shut it down afterwards

i played with bios settings, cleared the cmos, etc... i'm almost positive the monitor is fine, because if it was the monitor i assume two things would have happened differently:

1) it would have did this during post and the text based part of 2k setup too
2) it wouldn't have been on and off, on and off, it would have had distorted color or have just stayed off, one of the two probably

but what doesn't make sense to me, is the monitor never lost signal from the video card, the picture just kept blinking in and out, and it never did it in post or in dos, only when it started getting to a gui where it displayed stuff in more colors, so on one hand it seems to me like it would be the monitor, because it never loses signal from the chip, but on the other, why didn't it do it during post and dos too?

this is the first time i've ever seen a monitor / video card do this, it started doing it and kept doing it and i was like what in the hell? lol

9x before i formatted the drive would load, kernel32 would crash, and the entire thing would lockup, classic 9x style, which if it's a dying board, that would be the reason i think

he's been needing to upgrade his computer anyways, i let him borrow parts from me for a few weeks till he gets paid and he's gonna buy a new cpu, video card, and case and i'm gonna let him have an old asus board of mine that i have no use for, but what exactly happened to this one?

[unicorn]

"...what exactly happened to this one?"

Well....
98 crashed due to something. Until the crash obviously worked.
Dos (and dos-part of win2k install) works.

My guess, simple one, is that we are talking about quite old equipment not compliant with win2k.

What happens if you boot DOS from a floppy and then reinstall win98? If it still doesn't work it's the mobo of course.

my small coins,

[KingCobra]

I had a system that when I would install XP the screen rolled from the graphic part until the end of the setup. After the install was complete, it was fine. This happened everytime I did a reinstall of XP on that computer.

Yep I finished the install, but it was hard. It was VERY hard to read the screen to enter the serial key and select all the questions during setup.

I'm still not sure why it happened, but as I mentioned before it cleared up when the install was complete. Therefore I never bothered to worry about it.

Have you hooked up a different monitor yet to rule that out? I would guess that the current monitor is as old as the rest of his system?

[Sephiroth]

i tried a different monitor, and it did the same thing, and yeah, the monitor is just as old as the rest of it, he's had it for about 3 years, and it had been used for a year or so before that

.unicorn, good point about not being 2k compliant, same thing zone-mr said, but, i thought the standard vga driver it loads during setup is just that, standard vga, will work in 640 x 480 with 16 colors on anything? i didn't try to reinstall 98 to see what would happen, he's tired of it constantly crashing and wanted 2k or xp so it would be stable and stay that way, so dead or not it's time he upgraded anyways

[KingCobra]

Is there anyway you could continue with the install to see if it clears up after the install is finished. Like it did for me.

With me I know the WinXP install menus by heart so I didn't really need to see the screen clearly anyway. Just enough to know what screen I was on so I knew what info to enter.

[Sephiroth]

i'll try that tuesday kingcobra, it's an sis530 chipset, which i think there are generic drivers for that chipset bundled with 2k, it's my uncle's machine and he lives about 45 mins away from me, so i'll try finishing the install the next time i go up there

[KingCobra]

COOL! Let me know what you find out. The system I was speaking about was an Intel PentII 166mhz. In fact, the BIO's on the system were so old it wouldn't support over a 10GB drive.

Ya and the monitor was just as old or older.

[tubebuoy]

There's a decent chance the prob is the default refresh rate or resolution for the monitor. You may not be able to correct this until installation is complete. Also, the generic video/monitor drivers with Win2K *will* work with the SiS chipset.

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[KingCobra]

@Sephiroth

Did you find out what the problem was?