New ATI 2400 HD Dual Monitor setup crashes all black

[SammyQ2]

Big trouble on the home front. This seems like a pretty knowledgeable forum and hope to get some assistance here.

I have a five year old Dell Dimension 4600, with 2.67 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 and 2.526 GB memory. I just acquired an Acer X203H 20" monitor to add as a second screen. I don't game, I just use it for general office stuff.

When I started all this, I looked at the Dell support site and saw that they recommended the ATI Radeon HD 2400 Series AGP Display adapter for my particular computer and service tag. I found a used one on Ebay , installed it, and every thing seemed fine. This particular card does not have the four-pin plug for the power supply.

Unfortunately, sometimes both screens suddenly go black. The only to get them back up is to unplug everything, then reboot. The odd thing is, it's quite intermittent. Yesterday I had everything on all day and everything worked just fine. This morning it has crashed three times.

It seems that if I unplug just the new monitor, and leave my old Dell monitor plugged into the ATI card, the system doesn't crash. I also noticed that the hard drive light never blinks after the crash happens, for what ever information that's worth.

I'm grasping at straws, here. I tried vacuuming any dust out of the AGP slot and re-seating the card.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Sammy from southern Illinois

 

[SammyQ2]

More information. The old Dell monitor is VGA and I used an adapter to plug it into the Radeon video card. The new ACER is DVI-I and plugs directly into the card.

Sammy

 

[SammyQ2]

One more piece of information. I was directed to the AND site to update the driver package to 9.4. Toward of the installation I get a Severe error message that says something like "Setup to install driver due to incompatible hardware or operating system. Installation canceled".

 

[Guest]

Did you ever get a response to this thread?

I have an HD 2400 Pro. It was running two 1280x1024 CRTs just fine. Then when I upgraded to two 2048x1158 flat panels running off the DVI splitter, it would crash the primary display anytime anything "video active" was happening. I have the display adaptor set to recover, so it immediately comes back, but it is completely annoying. If I reduce the resolution on one of the monitors, the problem goes away. DELL has replaced the video card once for me, but the problem persists. I'm thinking this card isn't powerful enough to handle the resolution. Any insights?