Hi guys. My mom got a new LCD screen from Acer a few months ago. Her computer at the time had Windows98 as an os (comp was purachased in 1998 and has since had one memory increase). On occation the new screen would black out for about a second or two then come back. Then it got more frequent (every few mins). Last week I convinced her to buy the XP Pro SP2 upgrade (not because of the monitor, for many reasons) I was hoping it might fix that problem, but it's still doing it. It's not the screen, because I hooked it up to my computer and it never blacked out. Question is this; Does she need some kind of upgrade for the new monitor to work right? I don't know what video cards are or what they do, does that have something to do with this problem? Thanks to anyone who might be able to shed some light on this and help me get her comp working for her. The XP upgrade fixed everything else that was wrong with it so this is the last annoyance.
the graphics card would be my fisrt port of call, checking all conecting cables and ports to make sure they are all propperly inserted. my second would be the power supply. after 9 (ish) years it could be slowly giving up and the blank screens are caused by an intermittant drop in power.
thanks for the quick responses. I have been looking at PCI cards (no APG slot that I can see inside the thing). I found an nvidia GeForce one at circuit city's site for about 50 bucks that will probably work with her Celeron (i know) processor. Before I convince her to spend another (but hopefully the last) large amount of money on her 9 year old computer, I would like to try that change in refresh rate, how do you go about that?
Not sure that I would spend a lot of money on a 9 year old machine . . . Here's how to set the Refresh Rate: Right click somewhere on your desktop away from a folder to bring up a dialog. Click Properties, brings up Display Properties. Click Settings tab. Click Advanced. Click Monitor tab. Should show you Refresh Rates via a pull down. Select the one you want to try. KEEP the Box checked to hide those you cannot display!
One last question. If I get this PCI graphic card and install it, it says it has 128mb of memory. The card she has is built into the motherboard, so I assume it uses memory from the computer. Will this new card free up a tiny bit of memory since it comes with it's own? Comp still runs ok for an oldie, but it's kind of maxed out as far as RAM and any little bit will help. Thanks!
