Video Card Problems

[wobbles]

i have a friend that is having a problem when he turns on the computer all he gets is this...

X300 SE 128MB BIOS P/N 113-A33406-100 on a black screen

it is a Dell dimension 4700, 4gb ram wind xp sp3 128 bit x300se ati card

can some one tell me if it is true the Video card or something else

thanks   

[Computer_Commando]

...can some one tell me if it is true the Video card or something else...

Something else.

[wobbles]

what is it then?

I took out all the ram and reseated them one by one. and only then did it come up, and it is still up how do you tell if one of the chips are bad?
Now here is the other thing, the computer had 4 gig ram in it. when i turn it on with the video card that came with the machine it dropped down to 3.25 so i can see that the video card was taking some of the memory up. But when we replaced the video card with a x1800 that had 512 on the card, now when we booted the machine up the memory dropped down to 3gigs, shouldn't it go to normal at 4gigs of ram..

 

[patio]

If he's not running a 64bit OS then it's going to report/use only about 3.4G of RAM at best...
Different apps will report different amounts of RAM in this situation...entirely normal.

[Quantos]

I have to agree with patio.

Unless there's something else that you haven't told us.

[wobbles]

no he is running windows Xp Pro 32bit OS.. it is a Dell machine.

[Computer_Commando]

Reseating the RAM fixed the booting problem.  The BIOS may or may not recognize the full 4GB of RAM.  Since the OS is 32-bit, it can only address 4GB of memory space, including the graphics card, and all the peripheral devices, i.e. everything on the motherboard (IDE, SATA, USB) and everything that connects to it.  Some BIOS's will reserve space for the peripheral devices.  Only way around this is to look for BIOS setting Remap Memory Hole.  Set to enable.  It's possible Dell has a BIOS update to resolve this.