Hey there, I just reinstalled windows xp pro on my pc. While installing it it made me switch my monitor to my original video slot that is built into the motherboard. So i took out my newer video card. After installing windows I tried putting back my newer video card and it loaded windows fine, got to the desktop screen and it was showing in the tool bar that it detected the newer video card and then suddenly the screen went black and said "no Signal". Anyone know why this is happening? The video card i am trying to get to work is a radeon 9200. Thanks

When you booted up Windows before the monitor went black, which card did you have it plugged into?

There are several things you may need to do. Power down your computer. Remove your new card. Bring up windows. If windows stays up and is stable, go to Control Panel Add/Remove Programs and remove all of the drivers for your Radeon. In addition remove any drivers for your onboard video. This should set your driver to a Standard VGA. It might ask you to install software for the new hardware it has found when you get back to your desktop. Don't. Just power down again. Put in your new card. When the computer starts up get into the BIOS (hit Del or F2). Go to the video portion of the BIOS and tell it not to use the onboard video as the default. Press F10 to save the configuration in Bios. Let windows come up. It should find your new card. Install your drivers from the CD that the card came with or the most recent drivers you downloaded from ATI.

Am not sure whether the Pro version of XP suffers from it as well but there's a known issue with the initial graphics card driver in XP. Hitherto, previous versions of Windows would initially install with a basic VGA 800X600 screen. However, with XP, a Microsoft default full-screen graphics driver is automatically installed and this is one designed for VGA operation only. In some cases, this will switch the graphics card's output permanently to VGA mode and prevent the use of digital mode. Hence, a black screen.

Obviously, I don't know the details of your monitor/graphics card setup but if this is what you're experiencing, then the way around the problem is to initially connect the card to the monitor in VGA mode (so as to allow something to be displayed), then go to the driver of the graphics card in Device Manager and use 'Update Driver'. You'd update with a known good driver for your graphics card, which you'd previously installed into an appropriate folder, pointing the update process to the location of that new driver. Then reboot with the appropriate video cable/connection.