comfort zones are for sleeping

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

A tale of woe, and a plea for help

Well, the worst has come to pass. I can only assume by your stunned silence that you have already guessed the source of my grief: that’s right, my graphics card on my home machine has died. This tragic event occurred last Thursday evening, and I have been basically without a machine to call my own ever since. For the bereft among you, I will bring the old board into my office tomorrow morning for a proper funeral. Viewing will be from 7:30 to 8:00 AM. In lieu of flowers, it is requested that donations be made to the .Net Newbie on Rails fund (cash only please, no personal checks). Needless to say, this is seriously cutting into my RoR programming and blogging. That ain't living, that's just barely surviving. Like a vampire eking out an existence on the blood of rats and birds he traps in the cemetery.

The machine in question is a Dell Dimension E521 with onboard video, but I can’t get a video signal from the onboard video, not even during POST. Nothing, nada, zilch (and no, the monitor is not the problem). I got a new card (EVGA 7300 GT) from Fry’s this weekend and tried installing it. Here are the scenarios I’ve tried so far with little or no luck:

1) Monitor hooked to fried card (well, obviously)
2) Monitor hooked to onboard video, with fried card still installed
3) Monitor hooked to new card
4) Monitor hooked to onboard video, with new card installed

Scenario #2 worked for a couple of hours on Sunday night, but it stopped working last night before I installed the new card – no idea why. None of the other scenarios has worked at all. Tonight I’ll try taking the new board out and going back to onboard video. Beyond that, I’m clueless as to what to do.

Here’s where you come in: HELP!!! I welcome any advice on getting this solved.

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