I'm having heck with my system... got home tonight and my system wouldn't boot. Guessed it was the video card, as it's been acting up for a while now. Sooo... unhooked my system box, pulled out the suspect video card, pulled a lesser card out of an older system and put it into my system. Hooked it back up... and it still didn't work. Booted, but no display. Sooo... grabbed an old 14" monitor off the same system that provided the test video card and hooked it up. Hooray! It displayed. But now I was wondering if the video card was really at fault, so I took my system down yet again and put the suspect card back in, hooking it up to the 14" monitor. Hooray! It booted and displayed, leading to the conclusion that the monitor was bad. Sooo... we started pricing new monitors. After doing that on Rose's system for a few minutes, I turned back to my system and found it hung up with a black display. So it seems both the video card *and* the monitor are bad.
Put the old video card back in, hooked it up to my suspect monitor, and managed to get it to display in Windows at least (it doesn't display the DOS screen while the system is booting) so I should be able to run like this until I can get a new video card tomorrow.
Just now, my system tried to pop up the TV tuner program to record "Lost". It not only dogs my system down almost to the point of being unusable, but it only displays about a quarter of the TV screen in the little tuner window. Luckily, it appears that the MPEG file it creates is all right...