Recommend a video card.

[The Dude]

A couple of thoughts:

1) I'll look and see what I have when I get home and let you know if I have anything. If I have a card, you can have it.
2) The card that you have in there is an XP-PCI2800 card. It should be able to do plenty high enough resolution. I suspect tedmich is right and the proper driver is not installed. If you go to "Device Manager" and look under the graphics display properties, what does it say the card is? My guess is that it is just using some generic driver. If so, click the update driver button and see if it finds a better driver.

[big_teee]

Maybe, you have to have the chipset software running (ATI or Nvidia) to get some newer cards to work properly. Try loading drivers for the card, likely it can do any resolution you need.

I forgot about drivers.
I wanted to tell him to upgrade his Kernel!
T

[Bill Moore]

Well guys, thanks for the help! When I repowered it to look for drivers, the monitor stayed dark, shining a light against the screen, I can make out the desktop, and icons. I grabbed one of the crt monitors from the back room, and tried again, actually doesn't look bad! I have another LED monitor at the house, so I'll bring it in tomorrow, and see what it looks like, maybe the monitor is dying, and causing my problems! (It was new in 2004!)
Thanks again to all!!!
(I'll update tomorrow).

[The Dude]

Sounds like your backlight or backlight supply is taking a dump. The most common fault of displays is bad caps. If you care to have a try at fixing it, you can Google the model number of the monitor+repair+backlight or something of the sort and quite often find common problems and solutions without much effort. I've repaired plenty of displays by just swapping out a few caps.

[tedmich]

Classic symptoms of bad CCFL back light. More modern LED back lights have issues but at least they're not running on HV AC!! New caps can often bring these back to life, as tehD said.

[Jazz P Bass]

That 2004 manufacturer date puts it right at the tail end of the 'bad capacitor fiasco'.

[Bill Moore]

Thanks to all again, I brought a different monitor in to try, and it does nothing, reconnected to crt, still nothing. I guess I have an intermittent problem, (which may be unrelated to the video circuit). I updated my data on that machine yesterday to my backup drive, and have a new program coming that is supposed to run on my newer machine. With luck I can transfer my customer data, if not, I guess I won't be able to tell Mr. Gonzales, (or anyone), the repair history of their vehicles. (He called this morning wanting to know when we replaced the timing belt.)
Not really the end of the world!
Thank you all again!

[The Dude]

I would bet my lunch that it's the power supply failing. If you have a spare power supply or old PC laying around try swapping out the power supply. You don't even have to mount it up. Just temporarily hook it up laying outside the machine and see if that takes care of the problem.

On your data: You should be able to mount up the hard drive out of your bad machine into the new machine as a second drive and retrieve any data you wish, assuming that the drive is still good.

[Bill Moore]

I installed the Casper backup drive in place of the original drive c, and after trying several times, it decided to boot, (after lunch). I did a disc cleanup, and disckeeper defrag on that drive. I then connected the original drive to my backup interface, (USB). It took several times powering on before the computer recognized the drive, but when it did, I wiped it, and started a Casper clone of the drive that it booted from. When it finishes, I hope that it is serviceable, so I will have 2 copies. The thing with Casper, it clones the entire drive, programs, OS and all.
Dude, when I first started having problems, I measured the voltages that power the drive, and fans, and all were OK. I have replaced the P/S in other computers, but they were fried, and you could smell it! So far no evidence with this one.
If I can transfer customer info from the old program to the new one, I won't complain about the machine any more!

[The Dude]

Sounds like you've got it under control. Good luck to you!

[tedmich]

Always replace old magnetic HDs about every 3-4 yrs or you will probably be sorry; they are the weakest link in PCs.
Go SSD for better speed and security .

Make sure its not a bad video cable Bill! Good luck!

[big_teee]

Earlier You were talking about different versions of MS Office?
As a free alternative to MS Office, is LibreOffice.
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/
It is compatible with MS Office document versions.
I use it exclusively with Linux. I'm on the 5.04 version that is a few months old.
It has versions for Windows, Linux, and MAC.
It is a very good cheap alternative to MS Office.
There seems to be no Malware in the linux versions.
I would think it would be clean for Windows also.
It wouldn't hurt to check it out.
If you install it, I would simply open it and then run my AV for my home folder.
I really dig it, you might too!
GL,
T

[Bill Moore]

Thanks, Terry!
I bought myself an inexpensive tablet for my birthday, (Win 8.1), and could not get Office 13 to install, I ended up giving the program to my niece for her laptop. The tablet came with a "free" year of Office 365, but I have to bring it to town, (and an internet connection), now and then, to get it to keep working. I will try the LibreOffice with it!

[big_teee]

Sounds good Bill.
For the Documents to be compatible with MS Office you have to save your Douments in MSO file types.
LibreOffice has by default .odt, I still use .doc & .xls.
That way you can be compatible with everything.
You can select any type you want to be your default type.
T

[Steve A.]

Always replace old magnetic HDs about every 3-4 yrs or you will probably be sorry; they are the weakest link in PCs.

Good advice! You can use the version of Acronis typically bundled with retail drives to create an exact clone of your older drive which you can then save as a backup of everything up to that point (be sure to write down date disc was removed.)

Go SSD for better speed and security.

Yes for running your programs and operating system but it can get pricey for voluminous data files. I bought an external BlueRay writer last summer specifically to back up 25GB of data files per disc but I have not used it yet. My bad!

Just thinking how that's a lot bigger than the 360kb 5.25" floppies I used for backups 30+ years ago...

Steve Ahola

P.S. Just thinking that in a year or two I will have spent half of my life (and 2/3rds of my adult life!) screwing around with computers running on operating systems from Microsoft. Time to move on to Linux!