On  5 Jan 99 at 22:21, Elizabeth Boston wrote:

>         A gentleman brought me his computer today, a no
> brand (possibly custom built) early Pentium
> computer with no manuals or documentation.
>
> Windows 95
> Amibios 1992
> Socket 5
> 4 ISA slots
> 3 PCI slots
> 8 MB ram
>
>         He could only get 16 colors with his present video card,
> and wanted one that he could get more colors with. I thought this
> was going to be easy.

  His card is (being treated as) a vanilla VGA using the support
built into the OS.  There might be a driver for his card that would
give additional choices -- if he ever had such a driver, it is
failing to load, either due to corruption or to being for a different
card (or, just possibly, to the card no longer properly identifying
itself).

>   First I put in a S3 Trio64V2 that I had (I'm moving up in the
> world, I had one whole video card in stock *grin*) Windows detected
> it, but froze every time it tried to install the drivers. I played
> around with different PCI slots, and trying to load the standard
> VGA drivers, but the results were always the same.
>   Then I took a Cirus logic card out of a computer my kids use, but
> the computer wouldn't even boot.

  Some cards don't like some PCI slots, but you seem to have checked
for that[*].  I don't know about the Cirrus problem, but on the Trio
maybe you have to make sure that any old video drivers are
uninstalled first?

[*] Some PCI slots may be mapped to specific IRQs, or some devices
may require a slot equipped for bus-mastering.  Hmmm -- maybe there
were none of the latter on this old motherboard?



David G

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