[VJH]

I have acquired a second hand IBM computer (budget type) but it does not have an AGP slot (or more precisely the AGP slot is disabled). When playing a video clip, both sound and picture are very jerky due to missing bits out, I suspect this may be due to the on board video/graphics using the system RAM rather than its own dedicated RAM.

Can I use a PCI graphics card, is this likely to improve the situation and if so is there a recommended card (not too expensive)?

[grush]

Can you not enable the AGP slot in the Bios. finding a PCI card new will not be easy second hand ??
Without knowing what the board is it's difficult to give the correct advice.

[Neodude112320]

What do you mean by 'the Agp slot is disabled' ? If the computer has an AGP slot it will use it if it has to....

[Jms006]

Are you sure its not a driver issue?

[slipend]

Go to CMOS, on your mobo it could be anything. Look out for signs like "Hit Del to enter setup" etc

When you are there have a look for the Graphics port or what ever it may be labeled as on your CMOS.
Then enable it.

Look for a AGP card on the market.

here is one

[VJH]

Thanks for the replies, folks. I have scoured the web for information on how to enable the AGP socket - yes there is one and yes it is disabled. The IBM instruction bumf (which is now controlled by Lenovo) says that if the AGP socket has a blanking plug in it, it is one of the disabled versions and mine does. I have found several references to this in a forum and many before me have tried to enable it but to no avail. The tech support from Lenovo only covers machines within the warranty period which is three quarters of useless.

I have now acquired a Radeon PCI graphics card which I hope will do the trick. The next query is this - all the advice is to disable the current graphics card and remove drivers before installing the new card and drivers, however since this computer has Intel graphics integral with the mobo, does this mean that if I disable it I will lose video, in which case, what do I look at to set up the new graphics card?

[grush]

As you're running with onboard graphics you generally don't need to do anything. the OS should pick the card up and ask for the drivers. If you have a blank screen after connecting the monitor and rebooting you might have to enable the card in the CMOS. without knowing what the board is it's difficult to say

[VJH]

I may seem a bit dim but if the screen is blank, how do I enable the board in CMOS? (I want to try and get it straight in my mind before being confronted with a black screen and no way to reset it)

The board is an IBM 02R4087, btw.

[grush]

Go back to your onboard enable thePCI card then change back, chances are it won't happen. only ever known it once.

[VJH]

Sussed it. After plugging in the graphics card the screen was blank on the on board socket but connecting to the new card gave a picture so I was able to set up drivers etc. I tried disabling the on board graphics from control panel > system but it seemed to make no difference.
Looks ok now so many thanks for the help. Unfortunately, video/sound is still jerky which is what I fitted the board for! So it is think again time.

[Dave Hybrid]

Jerky video/sound can be due to a slow running hard drive stuck in slow PIO mode.

http://winhlp.com/node/10

[VJH]

Not sure how to determine whether the hard drives are in PIO mode.
The bios makes no mention of DMA at all. I would have thought that the disk drive controllers in device manager would have had some sort of DMA setting but again there is no mention. There is a DMA tickbox in the disk drives themselves in device manager (not the controllers) which I have selected, despite the dire warnings from windows that enabling DMA could have undesirable effects on the hardware! This seems to have made no difference to the video clips though. Is there another way to check whether the drives are working in PIO mode?

[cheesewheels99]

go to newegg.com!!! they have all kinds of good things!