New Video Card

My son purchased a new PC game, Rise of Nations, but he couldn't play it on his machine. It complained about the video card not being compatible.

He has an eMachines eTower 600is with a built-in Intel video system that uses 4MB of system RAM. To replace it, I ordered a Radeon 9200SE PCI with 128MB of RAM.

I checked the eMachines support page and found that no jumper changes were needed; the system would auto-detect the new card. Sure enough, after we installed the card, connected the monitor, and powered up, we saw the eMachines spalsh.

Unfortunately, nothing else happened. The hard drive churned for a while, but nothing came up on the screen. After trying that a couple of times, I pressed F8 during boot to get the Win 2000 options screen. I selected Enable VGA Mode to bring it up in 640x480. It came up OK, and I was able to install the ATI drivers. After the install finished, it rebooted.

Same problem. It never got past the Win 2000 progress screen. I rebooted in VGA again, and went to the video settings to see what mode it was in. I found that it was still recognizing the Intel video. So I enabled the 1st monitor on the 9200 (monitor #2) and disabled the Intel video (#1).

Success! Now it is running in 1600x1200 mode (which is a little small).