Use tv as pc monitor

[Tierney]

we're trying to help a customer connect a new LG widescreen tv to his pc which has a Hercules Prophet 9000 Pro 128mg graphics card. We have 2 problems (well okay we probably have more than 2 problems .. another problem being the customer did not advise the retailler that he wanted to use the tv as a monitor display)
1. Its (it being the graphics card) installed under winxp pro (comes up as radeon which is fine) BUT it also keeps trying to install the drivers etc AGAIN and calls them secondary. The secondary drivers have a res of 640x480 and 8 bit and will not change. There is also no ATI control panel. The "initial" drivers work fine on the vga monitor as you'd expect them to. The ATI control panel is present but you cant change/enable the tv device as this is greyed out. And yes, i've tried uninstalling/reinstalling the latest drivers from the Hercules website. WinXP still insists on loading a secondary set of drivers and there is only one graphics card inside the system.(Just so you dont think I'm totally silly)
2. There is no display on the tv. Its connected with the appropriate s-video leads and audio (limited connections on the tv, s-video being the best option)I've tried everything I can think of but I'm about at wits end. I'm presuming that until the settings accept that there is a tv we wont ever get a picture .. yeah?

Will the secondary drivers disappear if we unplug the tv while we try to get the tv going? If we do that then how will the pc recognise that there is a tv there at all? We've tried the options under the dual display and we cant get them to work (refer to problem 1)

Any and all suggestions would be most gratefully appreciated!
Denise

 

[bleeper4]

The best thing I would try is to download ATI's drivers and use those (if you haven't already done so).

 

[tedsmith]

Maybe this might help
Some TV cards only work when you have the monitor connecet at time of boot up.
TV can never be anything better than 640x480 (if that) if you are using the composite video connection.

 

[dakota81]

From what I've used with ATI based cards, the card will output to both the monitor & s-video outputs simultaniously at all times; thus you should see the bios post at initial boot, even before Windows & any drivers kick in.

But I've never used a Hercules card before, don't know how they build their's.

ATI OEM cards, specifically the Sapphire Radeon 7000 cards I've used, can't use ATI's drivers nor the drivers provided by Sapphire's website. It works fine with the generic WinXP drivers, and also I can install an older Sapphire driver version from the CD that came with the card (which works). What does this mean to you? I don't know, but just so you're aware there's some issues with ATI OEM driver compatibility.

 

[Sylvor]

Tierney,

Firstly you have to unplug the TV from the system and make sure the PC works fine using the monitor. Once you have verified that, install the latest driver for your card (

http://ts.hercules.com/eng/index.php?pg=view_files&gid=1&fid=1&pid=23&cid=1)

Then you can reconnect the TV (ensure that the &quot;Autodetect plug and play monitors&quot; button is ticked under the &quot;General&quot; tab in <Advanced display settings>) - hopefully the system should autodetect the TV and you can go into the &quot;Monitors&quot; tab and set up the TV.

Good luck,

Dave