Old(ish) video card + Windows 2000 Pro = BSOD

[mh2360]

I have an old base unit (Asus A7VI-VM, Windows 2000 Pro) which I am putting together with a lot of old parts I have laying around. I want to use an old Elsa Erazor III Pro 32mb (TNT based) AGP graphics card, as it's better than the on-board S3 Pro-Savage. The problem is, every time it gets to the Windows 2000 title screen, I get the "Blue screen of Death" saying something along the lines of "the bios is incompatable with ACPI" (or something, I can't remember exactly).

I have:

Updated Windows 2000 (everything on MS Update)
Found latest Elsa Drivers for Windows 2000
Updated Asus Motherboard bios to latest version (1003)
Updated Erazor III bios to latest version (3.05.00)

Can anything else be done before I (gladly) throw the card in the bin and visit Ebay?

[redwudz]

ACPI is for power control of the PC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI Probably not related directly to your video card.

You might want to go into BIOS and see what the settings are. It may be the method of video blanking is set wrong when the monitor goes to 'sleep' or one of the other power settings. Try setting them to default. if that doesn't work, maybe some other settings there.

[mh2360]

I played around with the bios settings, anything video/AGP related, same error every time though. I set the motherboard to "Load setup defaults, save and exit", still no joy. I did notice that if I "cold boot" the system, that is, to disconnect the power completely for a minute or two then reboot, then it <sometimes> will boot to the desktop. If I "warm boot" (Start>Shutdown>Restart) then it <ALWAYS> fails to boot.

Gonna ditch the card I think, far too much trouble than its worth...

[Steve Stepoway]

My experience with Win2k is that it is really picky about hardware in general and graphics cards in particular. Is yours on the hardware compatability list for w2k?

Steve

[mh2360]

My experience with Win2k is that it is really picky about hardware in general and graphics cards in particular. Is yours on the hardware compatability list for w2k?

Steve

Microsoft Website says it should be fine... After "google"ing around and finding nothing like this regarding this paticular card and motherboard, I'm beginning to think there's a fault with one of them.

[bevills1]

It mostly depends on mobo's video requirements. I had an old 32 MB video card that worked fine with an old mobo, but I encountered your same problem when I tried that video card in a newer mobo. A search found newer mobo required 64 MB video memory, and I replaced old video card with 128 MB card after which everything functioned normally.

[mh2360]

Not sure it's the MoBo thats the problem, I had it working a while ago with a 32mb GeForce 2 MX400 AGP.

[SingSing]

Have you tried disable the onboard video ?

[mh2360]

Have you tried disable the onboard video ?

There's no way on this MoBo to actually disable it. There's a setting for "Primary Graphics Adapter", which I set to AGP (other choices are PCI and On-Board).

[autodidact]

If the motherboard doesn't properly or fully support ACPI even with the latest BIOS updates then it may be best to setup Windows2000 as a Standard PC. If you can boot into safe-mode and change the computer type from ACPI to Standard PC then Windows will use a standard IRQ arrangement which should fix the video card related problems. If you can't get into safe-mode then setting Standard PC can be done during OS installation by pushing F8 I think. Whenever it asks about installing 3rd party drivers.