My computer won’t boot to Windows XP. From a half-scrambled screen I deciphered the following: “device driver [???]t stuck in an infinite loop. This usually indicates a problem with the device itself or with the device driver programming the device incorrectly.”
I assume I need a new video card. I have a Dell, and the video card is an nvidia geforce 7300 LE, 256 MB, turbo cache, PCI.
Does it look like I really need a new video card?
Dell doesn’t sell these any more. I found a lot of “geforce 7300 LE” sellers, but most of them don’t say “nvidia”. Can I use them anyway?
Can I use some other video cards? My monitor is an analog LCD and it does use the VGA connector on the card.
I don’t know if you need a new video card or if you just need to reinstall the drivers, but if you do, any PCI-Express video card will work. It doesn’t need to be the same one. Any video card you get will either have a VGA connector or come with an adapter.
My advice would be to boot into Safe Mode (hit F8 when the computer is starting up to get to that option). If you can get into Safe Mode, then uninstall the video card driver. This page from Microsoft has instructions for doing that. Then reboot the computer in regular mode, and install the latest drivers for your card from Nvidia.
If this doesn’t work, then you probably do need a new video card. Any PCI-E card will work, and even the cheapest new cards these days are much better than your Geforce 7300 LE (which really was a crappy, crippled card when if came out.) A cheap card like this Radeon 4350 should work if you were doing fine with a Geforce 7300. Though if you plan on doing any gaming in the future, then stepping up to something like this Radeon 4650 would be a good idea.
It couldn’t hurt to remove the video card and plug it back in. I had a Radeon get partially unseated from vibrations because I was working out a lot near my computer. I didn’t get that error message but it won’t cost you anything to try it.
Umm… why do you assume that? There are quite a few devices that load at startup – network drivers, disk interface drivers, usb, yadayada. You may well be right about the video card, but I’d cast about for more clues.
Seconded, actually almost any PCI-Express video card should work, it doesent have to be another 7300. Since decent 8500’s or better can be had for less than $50 you might even consider a bit of an upgrade.
I was merrily websurfing when suddenly my screen displayed turned bad. I’ll describe what it looked like. Of perhaps 20-30 vertical columns total, there were alternate columns of normal display and scrambling. The scrambling consisted of moving colored vertical lines and other odd effects. The cursor itself was affected only partially. It looked almost normal, even as it moved across the scrambled columns. However, a tiny scrambled piece of it moved in sync with it to the cursor’s right.
I tried turning the monitor off and on, but that had no effect. I brought up the monitor’s on-screen setup, and that displayed normally. This is where I figured the problem wasn’t the monitor.
I hadn’t changed the drivers, so I figured they were okay.
I tried to power down the PC, but ultimately I had to holding down the power button because XP shutdown wouldn’t complete.
I waited a minute, then powered the PC back up. All the startup screens were scrambled, but now normal and scrambled sections showed up in a checkerboard pattern. The squares were about the width of the initial scrambled columns and about 1 character in height.
Here’s the entire message that eventually appeared. The screen seemed to be in some kind of character mode, like you’d see if you wanted to enter setup. This was before anything resembling the XP logon screen came up. Sections undecipherable due to scrambling are in brackets.
I tried powering down and up again, but now the monitor goes into standby mode without the above redisplaying.
Reseating the card: I did open the PC and the card seemed pretty secure, but I’ll try that.
As for new/restored drivers, if all the power-on screens are scrambled, doesn’t that point to a hardware problem? And I don’t have a boot disk, anyway. :smack::smack::smack:
Thanks for all the replies so far. I’ll look into an upgraded card.
There’d be a separate plug if there were, right? There isn’t one.
I pulled out the video card and reseated it. Now, after displaying about 30 seconds of the boot screen, I get a blank screen with the message “This monitor cannot display in this video mode” or something close to it. It looks like that’s a message from the monitor itself.
I guess the fact my PC is a Dell explains that. But there was a huge discount at the time that made it a great deal, so I popped for it.
I have seen this problem before and while it’s probably the video card, if the video card requires an add-on power connector, it could also be that the PSU isn’t supplying sufficient power. Not relevant in your case, but it may help someone else.
If this picture shows that the card can be a low profile one. Is yours low profile or full height? Can your Dell take a full-height card? I’ve seen Geforce 9600s in low profile.
Or it is outputting out of the range. I cant think of any monitors that dont support, the default resolution of safe mode. I guess such a thing is possible and grabbing a different monitor is a quick way to figure that out.
The checkerboard is worrisome and hints at a video issue. I think the best thing to do is to read the event log offline or grab the minidump he is generating at crash time and analyzing it with the free microsoft debugger and symbols.
But there was a huge discount at the time that made it a great deal, so I popped for it.