Ridiculous problem that originated with FX5200 - Please help

thebazel

Ok guys, this is somewhat of a messy problem, but please bear with me as I have no idea where else to go to.

I have a dell 8100 dimension, it came stock with a geforce2 32mb card.
About a year ago I upgraded it to a PNY Geforce FX5200 128 card, which was amazing and worked great for a few months. However, when I tried to upgrade the drivers about 6 months after I bought it, fullscreen games would no longer load when opened, it'd just go to a black screen.
So I system restored back every time I tried installing new drivers, and for whatever reason the card/drivers would work 100% again.

Now..I figured it was something wrong with the card and just left it the way it was. This past week I bought a Sapphire 9600Pro 256 Atlantis..amazing card..installed it..new drivers..everything worked fine so I figured I had overcome the whole Geforce thing. However, after a couple restarts, all of a sudden the black screen problem started occuring again. I couldn't believe it. Now it had started after I tweaked the card a bit with Rage3d and restarted after overclocks. But, the point is, it was the same exact problem as the Geforce. So I can't tend to believe its me overclocking, the drivers, or even the cards. It has to be something else with my system.

Now listen to this - if I restart my pc right now and say try to run need for speed 2 underground as the first application, it'll go to the black screen and the end, the pc s locked.

BUT If I open up 3dMark2001SE, run the bench, and then cancel immediately after the bench started(the monster truck one) and then I try opening NFSU2 or any other full screen game, everything runs PERFECTLY.

How ridiculous is that?
So people know..this is what I've tried.

New video cards - obviously this isn't a hardware thing..from Nvidia to ATI the same problem..
New drivers - the original problem was when I tried to update the Nvidia drivers, but now it seems that wasn't the problem at all seeing as how this problem occurs with the Radeon 9600 as well..
Driver cleaner - over and over
Stock drivers - works for one install, then after restart problem comes back
Updated bios - no change
Cleaned NDRAM - no change
Took everything out of my PC and basically replugged it in, including ram sticks, sound card, friggin everything - no change

I've come to the assumption that this isn't my card, or my drivers, but some sort of windows error or some other conflict.
I can't explain that if I run 3DMark before anything after restarting, the system will work 100% fine..and 3DMark never fails to load, even though its a full screen application too.

So any thoughts anyone? I thought about updating my motherboard drivers but I have a Dell motherboard and have no idea how to..any tips?
Also I thought about reinstalling WindowsME..see if that helps..

I'm open to anything guys, I simply cannot figure out what is the cause of this problem.

RebelWolf

You won't like my suggestion, but at a guess, your Window's install has become corrupted.

If I had the same problem you are having, I would have fdisk'ed and reinstalled everything.

Yes it's a royal pain, but a clean windows install, MB drivers install, and then putting in your vidcard and other drivers, would at least assure you that it was a "real" hardware issue.

Only suggestion I have for you, considering everything you've already tried, you need to start fresh so you can start ruling out items as part of the problem.

RebelWolf

pr0digal jenius

try reinstalling/updating direct X and your chipset drivers first...if that doesn't work, reinstall windows