An appeal for information, I am at a loss.

I am currently playing with a HP Pavilion XL754. 384 meg of ram (out of a possible 512). Two 40 gig hard drives. A CD Burner and a DVD drive. 850 meg Pentium III. Windows XP PRO.

Unit was given to me and I started installing what I had. I installed the drives, modem, and memory myself without problem. Came with XP PRO, although it must be a hot copy as I can't download the service pack.

I want to disable the onboard video and install my ATI Radeon 7000 which has 64 meg of video memory, a good increase over the onboard chip.

Supposedly I can disable the onboard video through the device manager in windows, which I did. Disabled video and deleted driver.

I them powered down the system and installed my new video card, a PCI card in slot one and connected the video cable, moved the modem to slot two. There are four in the tower.

I next power up the system, the blue HP screen comes up..........and that's it. Windows does not load. It will sit there all day like that. I cannot even shut down using the power switch, at this point I have to unplug the tower (i don't like doing that, feels dangerous).

I remove the pci video card and restore the video cable to the onboard chip, leaving the modem in slot two from now on. The system fires, loads, and installs correct driver for onboard video.

Thus far I have not found jumper information about the motherboard, perhap I just haven't looked in the right place yet? I've been to HP, I haven't been to Microsoft due the apparent 'hot copy' of XP PRO since I have no other operating system to use.

Any suggestions are greatly apprciated. Thanks for your time.

Yep, sounds like a jumper issue, though the vid card might be bad. If you have a spare one that you know works, you could try it and see if it works.

Thanks borghunter, man that was a fast reply.

Alas, I only have the one. My research brought up an interesting option, but it is only a novelty at best, I think. I read in the help section of windows xp pro that the operating system can handle two monitors by adding the card to the system. Have you ever tried such a thing. I have another monitor laying around and might give it a try.

Yes, XP can handle two montiors. I don't know how well, though, since I've never tried it.