Trouble adding new video card into Acer Aspire 1831

[visnaidu]

Hi, I've got an Acer Aspire 1831 computer. It has on its motherboard an ATI Rage II+ chip with 2Mb of video RAM. It is god-awful slow and only supports a few resolutions. I've got a ATI All-In-Wonder Pro PCI video card and would like to use this instead. I installed the PCI card, connected my monitor to it and booted up my machine. There was no display. I connected my monitor back to the on-board video card port and it worked there. I tried to disabled the on-board video card in Windows 95 Device Manager but still no display when I connected the monitor to my PCI card and rebooted. Is there a way around this ? Please help me as I'm very anxious about using my PCI video card as it far superior to my on-board one. Also, my on-board one can not be disabled on the motherboard, so I must do it in Windows 95 (the OS I'm using). Help !?

[Mr. D]

was up i got the same computer but i am using v3 2000 pci and it works fine i dont know about the card that you have but maiby the drivers that are instolled for the on-board one are mesing it up and mine might work because the drivers are diferent ones and the computer dont get confused like in you computer so just uninstol you drivers and and trye that other drivers and then put the card on it's place

[spacecookie]

could the on-board video be disabled in the bios??

[R0gue]

You may want to check a couple of things. See if you can disable the video card any way ( I doubt through the bios, if it's a retail computer you probably can't ). Jumpers on the motherboard may be your only possibility.

The drivers are not the problem, your video signal is being outputted to your on-board card at POST, drivers don't have anything to do with that.

You may want to try changing the pci slot in which the video card sits, some require a bus mastering slot (usually the slot farthest from your ISA slots). This condition depends on what type of motherboard you are using and what BIOS it contains.

Hope this helps...

[Tim Lee]

For my compaq computer, on board video card can not be disabled using the motherboard. It must be done using the BIOS. It is kind of funny that it does everything automatically..... it automatically disable itself when a new PCI video card is installed(not all the time). I was able to get many valuable information from compaq forum. I think ACER may have that too. Check ACER homepage and see if there is any site like that.

Tim

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[visnaidu]

Hi, thanks guys. I just got too frustrated with the reasonably poor tech support I got (on the phone) from Acer so I said f*** it! I just returned the Video Card and figured I might as well live with my clunker until I can afford a real machine. God, I hate PC's. If everyone did things like Amiga and Macintoshes, we wouldn't have stupid idiotic problems with plug-n-play (sorry, in the PC world it is plug-n-pray). Man am I pissed. I had a sweet Amiga computer before I went over to the PC realm. Yes, it forces us to learn more about computers, but it is just not worth it in my books. Anyhow, guys look out for the latest Amiga and AmigaOS to come out at the end of 1999. It'll do it all and have it all right out of the box with expansion capabilities to the max - moreover expansion capabilities that consistently work
:-)