Tim Almond

I recently bought an nVidia FX video card for my main PC. In part, I was getting some ghosting on screen, and secondly, my monitor supports DVI and I wanted a card that would do likewise.

So, I get the card, install it and all is just fine. But then, it starts hanging during the PC bootup. I check the card, try changing BIOS settings, all sorts.

At this point, the PC doesn’t even boot. I talk to a friend of mine, who suggests maybe there’s some static or something. So, I take everything (but the chip) off the board and put the minimum boot stuff on. So, I do, and it’s all fine. Then, as I add more and more drives, it fails, works poorly and so forth. One thing is that the DVD drive comes in and out of being detected.

So, I scratch my head and decide that maybe I should get shot of a hard drive. There’s 3 in there including a 30GB Deskstar. I get everything off using Disk Director, and then disconnect the drive. The PC seems to be more stable and much quieter (the other drives are Seagate drives).

The only thing I can think of is that adding the more modern video card somehow took some more power from the supply, and thus couldn’t run everything I have. Remove a hard drive, and it goes below the required power. Or alternatively, my motherboard’s on the way out.

Tags: Technology //