Hi
About 6months ago I bought a Radion Sapire 9600 128mb graphics card and installed it.
My computer is about 13months old and a 2.3gighz I think.
One night while playing Grand theft auto 3 the computer crashed and I turned it off.

Next day when I turned it on I was met with a black screan.

The monitor was plugged in and the standby light was on, when I unplugged the monitor from the graphics card it powered up, but obvously did not display anything.

I thought I had nackered my computer in some way and was not pleased.
I proceeded to take out the graphics card.
Whn I plugged the monitor into the old plug on the back of the system and turned it on the computer worked booting up corectly!

Origionally the computer screan was black and no hit that any boot up sequence was taking place at all occured (no noises HD flickering or anythig.

Is the graphics card brocken? Or do I have to do something to bios, It did work correctly for about 6months. (I just plugged it in initially and xp did the rest.)

hi, welcome to DAL.
Whe you say

I thought I had nackered my computer in some way and was not pleased.
I proceeded to take out the graphics card.
Whn I plugged the monitor into the old plug on the back of the system and turned it on the computer worked booting up corectly!

Do you mean you got a picture on the monitor aswell or it just booted up with no picture?
If you got a picture, i think your graphics card may have broken. I don't see why it wasn't booting up with monitor plugged in . Mabe someone else can give a better answer

Thanks for replying so promptly!

With the graphics card in and the monitor plugged into it there was no response at all from my pc except the power on light!

The monitor was on stand by so was not recieving input to say power up.

When I pulled out the graphics card and connected the monitor to the on board graphics slot the computer worked again.

If i now plug the graphics card back in same problem.

My question is is there anything other than inserting it and running the drivers that I should have done? Do you have to change any bios settings or has the card just given up the ghost?

did you do change anything before it broke or did it just break randomly? have you tried it in a different PCI slot?

No i did not change anything the computer crashed mid game during grand theft auto 3 and on turing it back on 'black screan'

I only have one slot for the graphics gard all the others are different size such that it does not fit.

oooh, so its not a pci slot then? could you try your graphics card in a different computer to see if it works?
also, did you load the drivers from the disk or the internet?

I can not remember If xp set it up automatically, if not from the disk.

ooh, have you tried re-instaling the drivers from the disk?

Can I re install the drivers without the card inserted?

That should work, try it and see. If it doesnt work, it could be a windows update that does not agree with the card or a broken card.
If re-installing the drivers doesnt work, try a sytem restore.