|
I encountered
this problem with at least two video cards and Windows
98SE. Upon boot up, Windows makes it as far as the login
screen, then freezes with a thin green bar (or green line)
is displayed across the top of the screen. Only a reset
or power-off will exit from this screen. This problem occurred
not on every boot, but frequently enough that it needed
to be fixed.
In the pre-Google
days, searching was reasonably primitive, but I did find
this question, with a strange list of answers, buried
in the GeForce FAQ site of the day(1):
Q.
Windows locks up before it finishes loading, and a thin
green line may appear across the top of the screen. How
can I fix it?
- This
may be caused by the Backup utility supplied with Windows
9x/ME attempting to detect new tape devices on boot.
You can fix it by deleting the files drvwppqt.vxd and
drvwq117.vxd in the Windows\System\Iosubsys directory.
If this helps, then search for the string 'TAPEDETECT'
in your registry and delete any entries that exist. If
you find this causes your tape drive to stop working,
you'll have to reinstall Microsoft Backup. You can also
simply uninstall Microsoft Backup if you don't use it.
- Try
updating the motherboard's BIOS. In particular on some
Gigabyte boards based on the VIA KT133 chipset this may
fix the problem. See the following page for more information:
http://www.giga-byte.com/faq/question/question_kt133.htm
This may also fix the problem on ASUS A7V motherboards
- upgrade the BIOS to version 1004C or later.
- You
may find that on motherboards that are only AGP 1.0 compliant
you may be able to fix this problem by putting insulating
tape over the last pair of contacts on the AGP connector
on the Ge Force card (the contact furthest from the monitor
port, on both sides). This has been tested on the Chaintech
6BTM motherboard.
- Try
disabling the Windows startup sound.
- Make
sure that VSYNC is enabled in the NVIDIA control panel.
- If you
have IomegaWare installed, try uninstalling it. If this
fixes the problem, just use Iomega Guest.
Quite
an impressive array of disparate solutions! At first blush,
none had success written over them. If you look at the
list, few have anything to do with video: uninstall backup?
disable the
startup
sound??
And that one suggestion that is video card related has
a distinctly Car
Talkish quality to it: cover some AGP contacts with
electrical tape - geesh! But one has to start somewhere.
Astonishingly, fix number 1 works. After renaming the two Virtual
Device Drivers (VxDs) for Windows Backup, the green line/freeze never occurred! I restored
the original file names then removed Backup completely
with an uninstall. The deadly green line was forever a
thing
of
the past with
both nVidia cards.
I
mentioned all this to a computer guru we'll call "Rick" who
promptly attributed all this to my general naïveté with
upgrades. About four months later I received an e-mail
from him stating that he "was just able to fix
a friend's PC because you sent me this link. He has a FIC
MB with nVidia TNT2 VGA card and was also getting the green
line of death on boot."
Reference:
1. http://www.geforcefaq.com/faq.cgi#hw:gef:troub:startup:startlock -
This link has long expired, but that was the page accessed
sometime in the spring of 2001 and the original source for
the above quote. The domain geforcefaq.com now
seemingly has nothing to do with nVidia.
[Go
back to Willow Pond
PC Tips]
[Was this useful? Have something to add? Let
us know.]
|
