Good evening,

I recently acquired a WinFast GeForce4 Ti 4200, and installed it in my HP Vectra VL400 Pentium III system. Everything was going smooth at first. I installed drivers and ran 3dmark 01 on the machine several times. It gets about 5500 3d marks which I assume is normal for this card paired with a 1GHz PIII. No artifacting or crashes at all. Eventually though I rebooted, and the machine would not post. It gave a beep code, so I tried the usual CMOS reset by unplugging the machine, taking the battery out and holding the power button for 30 seconds, but to no avail. I also tried re-seating the RAM, but this didn't work either. I finally tried swapping the graphics card out for my GF4 MX4000, and it posted fine.

Whats weird is that I installed the Ti 4200 back into the system, and it posted just fine. Like nothing ever happened. I kept on testing the machine installing programs and of course with Windows 98 programs every single one it seems like wants to reboot after an install. I noticed that any time the system is rebooted from windows through a restart, the machine no longer posts. But if I manually shut it down, either through the power button or through windows, its fine.

Whats really weird is that all it takes the get the machine to post again is re-seating the graphics card, then it posts again. I am honestly perplexed as to what the issue could be as I've never ran into an issue like this on the hundreds of machines I've worked on.

Im at a loss. Im thinking it can't be Windows 98 because theres no way it could cause the machine to outright not post. I also checked to see what beep codes the machine gives when theres no GPU installed at all, and its the same as it does when it fails to post when the card is installed. That may be a clue, I'm not sure.

I can provide specs for the system if need be.

Anybody have any ideas??