Why isn't my video card detected by Windows?

Why won't my video card work?

• I am trying to install an ATI Rage 128 Pro PCI video card on a Dell Optiplex GX270 running Windows 7 32-bit. This card is manufactured in 2003. When I try to install drivers for it with the original installation disc that came with it, I get a message that the device hardware was not detected. I went into device manager and there is a yellow ! next to the video card. I look at the properties and the device status says: "This device cannot start. (Code 10)" The only option I can mess with that is even related to video cards in the BIOS is selecting the primary video controller: AUTO or ONBOARD. Dell computers do not like this video card for some reason. I did manage a workaround when I was running Windows XP. I selected in the BIOS to set the onboard video as the primary and I activated the PCI card in Windows XP. However I cannot do this workaround on Windows 7 until I get this PCI card working. Is this video card compatible with Windows 7 at all? If so, how do I activate it? The onboard video card on my Dell is a piece of **** and I want to use the PCI card for better graphics. 10 points to whoever gets this problem fixed.

• Answer:

  The ATI rage series were a bit twitchy whatever pc they were in. support for this card ended really with win98 however ATI did go back and provide a general driver for it for XP i have provided a link to this as it may be a different and better driver for you to try. so what are the chances of it working? well i dont think its very good. it might not be entirely down to dell as their bios will implement an exact version of the PCI spec. and the firmware(bios) of the video card may implement a different exact version of pci. you should make sure your dell bios is up to date. you may be able to find another video bios for the card but i doubt it will fix the problem, but it might. what your problem boils down to is this the operating system, talks to the mobo bios and asks it things and tells it things. These communications have to obey the windows rules and since the card is old, it cant know them, and since the mobo bios is old it cant know them either and thats what really decides if a pc is windows 7 compliant or not. so windows cant allocate the irq's and resources properly becasue it cant talk to the card properly. it is probably telling the card to set it resources to a specific place and the card cant do it. it is likely that some other device on the system has the resources that the video card needs. upgrade the dell bios if you can try your driver and the one i have linked to and see what happens.