Posted on 12/16/2013 7:23:42 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
It was the motherboard apparently. It doesn’t even try to start, there is no attempt to load a BiOS or read any media. No sound at all, no sign if life.
That's the reason I posted,......I'm running out of options.
I need a desktop,( that everyone says is dying), that will push 4 monitors, that I can afford. A video card to do this is more than the desktop and the driver only works up to XP. I'm retired and poor. I don't have the bucks to just ditch perfectly good machines to upgrade to the latest crap I don't need. I was devastated when I went to Win7 and found out I couldn't run my 2 video cards I had for years. Then I paid big bucks for a FireMV 2400 PCIE card only to find out the driver I got from AMD wouldn't work in Win7, then Vista, then back to XP and the driver worked. So now XP will be dropped and I have no doubt some asshat will write a malware that just turns XP into a dinosaur.
I'm not a snob, I would use Win98 if a browser would work in today's world. Have you tried that? Can't be done. Everywhere you go things jam and you are told to upgrade your browser and Win98 won't take a modern enough upgrade. So even if you wanted to use something that old, THEY WON"T LET YOU.
I have no doubt when XP is dropped, it will become useless toot suite. I've downloaded the Linux driver for the card but can't get it to load and all versions of Linux I've tried has to load in compatibility mode. It may work, but I'll never know. The Catalyst driver program doesn't work to load the driver, so that's where the guy with the command line "fix" came in. If they can't make a package that I can click on and everything is installed, then I'm done.
99% of the people can get by on a smart phone today, But I'm just different. I have a tablet I hardly turn on. I don't FaceBook, Twitter, or play games. I check email, trade stocks and surf blogs. I just can't trade stocks on a tablet or phone. I can barely make it work with 2 screens.
It's possible you won't be able to use hardware that old on a newer operating system. To get it to work someone with serious NERD credentials may be needed. I know those French Canadians that ran ATI when your card was made are complete douches.
If you're going to have to stick with XP, there will come a day when you won't be able to find a browser that will render web pages properly, just like you see now with Win'98. I know it's easy for me to say, because it isn't my money, but I think you need newer hardware.
If I run 1 or 2 monitors, I can run any modern OS with the Video cards I have in a box of pulls. Getting 4 to work is a real problem with Win 7 unless you have the bucks to plug and play. I just hated to retire my FireMV card with nothing wrong with it. Abandoning XP will bring about it's demise unless I can get a driver to work or go to another OS. I'm running Win 7 with it right now, but using a standard VGA driver and 1 monitor. In the morning, I will boot with my SCSI drive with XP on it and 4 monitors on the same box to trade my stocks.
1990, IBM clone, 20MHz, 512K RAM, 48MB HD, VGA monitor. Ran games (M1 Tank Platoon) off the 5” floppy. Dot matrix (tractor fed?) printer. All that plus whatever passed for Office cost me about $3000. Took out a loan from the credit union (they had “computer loans”) at 10%. Six months later it was obsolete.
Times have changed.
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