Sorry this is a long post. I hope someone will be persistent enough t
help me out.

I have been working on a friend's old Gateway 2000 GP6 (maybe G6?
300MHz PII MMX system.

It has a problem where the video "zaps out" frequently. I say tha
because the monitor literally makes a zapping sound as the scree
contents quickly collapse into a bright white spot and then it goe
black.

The video card in question is an ATI Radeon 9000 64M AGP card that wa
installed by "some guy" a year or so ago because they needed to run tw
simultaneous displays (one on the monitor and another on the s-vide
output).

I have determined that after the problem occurs, the OS (Win98 firs
edition) is not locked up. I can use the keyboard shortcuts to blindl
shutdown or restart the machine. However, the video will not come bac
until the system is powered off/on (restart won't get it back).

The problem seems to occur when the system tries to display a lot o
white. For example, clicking maximize in a blank Internet Explore
window will do it every time. I have also noticed that by starting wit
a small IE window and dragging it bigger and bigger, the problem wil
occur when the window has almost filled the screen.

First I thought this was a software problem (drivers or something), bu
now I don't think so.

The Radeon manual says the system should have at least a 300-watt powe
supply. This system only has 200W.

However, my friend insists that they did not always have this problem
I'm not so sure. I don't think one would really pay attention t
wheteher they were doing things full-screen and/or what the colo
content of the screen was.

Therefore I theorized that maybe the power supply had weakened ove
time and what used to be borderline OK had become a borderline failure
Miraculously, I happened to have a brand-new replacement power supply o
the exact same model (6500126) which I got stuck with on a prior repai
job. I tried the brand-new 200W supply and we still had the sam
problem.

The peripherals in the machine, besides the Radeon card are 1 ISA mode
card, 1 ISA sound card, 1 HDD, 1 floppy, 1 Zip drive, 1 CDRW. Thes
components have all been there since before the Radeon card.

While I had the new power supply hooked up, I tried disconnecting th
Zip drive to see if that would give us the boost we needed but it di
not.

I cleaned everything out with a can of air so it should be cooling OK
All fans appear to be fine and nothing feels hot to the touch. Thi
problem occurs even when the system is cold, however it may be a littl
worse when it gets hot (this is what first lead me in the direction o
power supply).

Just for a test, I replaced the hard disk with another and installe
Win98SE from scratch (did not load ATI drivers). Even in this defaul
state, 640x480 with MS VGA drivers, the problem occurred as soon as
maximized Internet Explorer. To me, this test eliminates software fro
my possibilities.

So what do you all think?

Could the power supply cause something like this (especially since th
Radeon doc specifically asks for 300W)? I want to believe my frien
that "it used to work fine" but I just think most people don't alway
pay that much attention.

Given the power supply theory, could it be the content of the scree
(i.e. mostly white) that pushes it over the edge?

I tried different resolutions and that did not help. It occurred to m
while typing this that one thing I did NOT try was disabling th
secondary display. Do you suppose that the combined content of bot
displays trying to do "all white" is what draws more current than w
have available? When we ask the video card to run both displays, wil
it need more juice?

Does it take more power for a video card to display more bright colors
or white?

Lastly, I would like to try a beefier power supply but I am afraid t
hook up a standard ATX replacement. I've been under the impression tha
Gateway used a standard ATX connector but the pinouts may be different
The physical differences are obvious, but I may be able to do a littl
drilling and fabricating to make a standard ATX supply fit physically.
It's just the electrical (pinout) part that scares me. I don't want to
fry my friend's machine.

If you've read this far, THANK YOU VERY MUCH IN ADVANCE!

-Marty


--
Marty