I'd be ever so grateful to anyone that can help me with this!. Today I inserted a new graphics card to my son's pc,whilst I was checking everything in bios my son nudged me I clicked on something to make the graphics thing start from the sys board! Now when I turn his pc on there is nothing on screen.Please can anyone tell me how to get into bios to change this?. I thought it would be easy to get back in there but nothing is on my screen.
I was going to fit another card but thought that silly as its the pc I have to try to get into lol.
Excuse the muddled titter tatter please, My head is now drowning as I've been trying now for 5hrs to resolve this lol.
I eagerly eagerrrrrrrrrrrrly await a reply.
   :-[  ( <--) my little erm £$%^%$££ Boy ) lol
Amber

Hi amber!

There are a few possibilities:

1) The cable is not connected correctly - remove and reconnect.

2) The only thing that I can think that may be wrong in the BIOS is the graphics are set to PCI instead of AGP (this assuming you have an AGP card - see below**). This would suggest you have an ON-BOARD graphics slot. Check the back of the PC, if there is another blue 15-pin VGA connected elsewhere, connect it and see if you get a display. Once you do - go into BIOS and set graphics display = AGP, then swap the cable over again.

3) The card is not inserted correctly. Take it out and reseat it. If this doesn't work I would suggest the card is faulty. It happens all the time.


**AGP is a slot that is coloured brown. The PCI slots are white. You will only have one AGP slot, but many PCI. They are about the same size. AGP is faster than PCI. If you have on-board graphics (no extra graphics card) then this is also called a PCI as it is using the PCI bus (and limited to PCI speed).

HTH - get back to us with results.

Hi Amber, I dont understand the "Boot from the board"  
I have never seen that option.
Did you use the clear CMOS jumper as that should reset it to the default setting ?

Can you give us some/any information about the pc Amber please ?
Motherboard make and model, CPU, any cards installed and the OS etc  

Intel Pentium lll
AMD K6/2 500 mhz cpu

Youve confused me and no doubt a lot of others now even more Amber  

Its either an INTEL or an AMD cant be both  

I was really hoping that you knew which motherboard it was, ATX is the type of board not the actual make.
Can you see anything written on the board itself, ie MSI or GIGABYTE or something like that and some numbers, they are usually quite easy to see  

R284R137 RP20
CE23
CE21
CE20

CB41
CB39

IDE1

R43

M101
191 UNDER IT

This any good Sandra?

I think you have some terms mixed up  

no worries: can oyu clear this up for me:

what were you doing before it went off?
You were in the BIOS? - that means there was a screen in front of you with various options. Depending on the make of your PC or mainboard, it may have been a grey or blue screen traditionally.
The BIOS is sometimes referred to as the CMOS. Its simply a set of instructions that are held in a chip, and the battery makes the chip remember them. So IN the BIOS means in the setup menu.

-Or were you doing something in the PC case (apart from putting in the AGP card)

You changed something from AGP to "on the motherboard"? It should only have an option from AGP to PCI. If you did "clear the bios" correctly (with your jumper change) then that should put everything back to defaults - you should see a picture.

You put an AGP card in the PC.
Did you take anything out - ie swap a PCI card or another AGP with this new one? If so, pop it back in, clear BIOS and try again! ALWAYS MAKE SURE CABLES ARE CONNECTED CORRECTLY!

If you did not remove anything, then the monitor MUST be able to plug into the port on the motherboard, as well as the new AGP. Remove the AGP and clear BIOS, then make sure the monitor is plugged to the motherboard port.

If all that fails (assuming you are CLEARING THE BIOS correctly) then you have a hardware problem of some sorts.

There are BIG agp cards out there (speed terms). Some motherboards cannot support them. It could draw too much power, and may kill ANY part of your PC. Maybe the hard drive is dead. Don't want to worry you, but I would MAKE SURE you are clearing the bios correctly!!  



on another note, I'm off on holiday to portugal... so i'll see you guys in two weeks!!  

hope you get the problem resolved!

if the battery isn't soldered in you can take a flathead screw driver and stick in there touching both peices of metal in the batter holder for 30 seconds or so and successfully reset the bios.

Sometimes thats easier than finding the reset jumper if you aren't technically inclined

To be honest, I wouldn't advise anyone who isn't technically inclined to poke a screwdriver anywhere near[/b] their Motherboard!    It may well be a method that works, but get someone who knows what they're doing to do it for you.