well i bought home some old PCI video cards to try in my moms machine..they didnt work, so i figured what the heck ill try em in mine...also didnt work..i think theyre too old to work with XP...but thats not my problem really....ever since i did that, my video card which is also PCI and was working just dandy no longer works...well let me rephrase that...i can start the machine with the card out and the onboard will take over.....when the card is in...neither will work. the card was installed at one time and worked wonderfully...well as wonderfully as a PCI card can(i dont have an AGP slot)....also after messing around with all this hardware i was asked to activate windows again...stupid Home....i did that and the problem is still there, it also doesnt matter what slot you put the card in...any ideas? im thinking of just reformatting, installing Pro and starting over...

See which card your BIOS has as primary. Had the same issue with my daughter'* computer.

Set the BIOS to see the onbaord as primary. Install the PCI Card (May have to force feed Windows the driver'* from tha manufacturers site). Reboot. Go into the BIOS and turn of or demote the onboard, and you should see something then...

Good luck and be patient.

BIOS has no setting to make one or the other dominant, i already looked...any other ideas?

kinda basic question, but did you remove the software and drivers for the other card?

well there wasnt really any software with the old card, XP automatically found drivers for it and all...so i guess no i didnt, but it doesnt show it as still being installed or anything...that might be the problem i guess, i swap stuff around all the time and its never been a problem though, doesnt make any sense....i think im gonna borrow a hard drive and back up my important stuff tonight and then format and install Pro...Home made me mad with its stupid activation crap anyway...from my experience you dont have to activate Pro...and this is a good thing.

well see if you can locate and remove the drivers of the old card, and manually install the drivers your card, my friend had a similar happenings and that fixed it, its worth a shot and easier than formatting

yeah i hadnt really thought of trying that, i think ill reformat anyway, ive been wanting to for a while now....and that should fix it. i wish my BIOS had an option to choose which video card you wanted to use..stupid Dell....but thanks for the help once again.

Depending on what model of Dell, you should be able to disable the on board video. I know mine will, anyways....