Windows 7: Installed Win7 with old video card. Bought new

I installed Windows 7 just fine. The video card on that computer is old, a Radeon 8500. No drivers exist for Vista or Windows 7. Windows 7 used the default VGA drivers. I purchased a new video card, a GeForce 6600, which has Windows 7 driver support. I installed the new video card. The bios screen comes up and post, then it goes to the "starting windows screen", then the computer reboots back to the bios screen.

Any ideas what may be wrong?

Hi.

What kind of card did you get? AGP, PCI or PCI-e?

First thing to try is to disable the onboard vga and set your new card's type to be the primary display device, in bios.

Also, especially if it's AGP card, please fill in your system specs as best as possible. It will go a long way to figuring this out.

Re-install the old card. Can you boot?

If yes, boot and uninstall the video card via Device Manager.

Shutdown.

Remove old card.

Install new card.

Boot.

Test, report.

Its an old, home built system. Abit NF7-S mobo, AMD XP cpu, 3 GB RAM, old video card is a Radeon 8500. New card is a Nvidia Geforce 6600. AGP specs are 8x/4x.

I reinstalled the old card and Windows 7 boots up just fine. I will try removing the video card from the DM and then install the card.

Sorry for the bad news, but that motherboard can not accelerate any kind of graphics in the AGP slot on Windows 7 or Vista because it's an nForce2 board.

Anything nForce3 or lower is impossible to work.

Where is this documented? I actually managed to get the Radeon 8500 working with WinXP drivers but its not stable. Doesnt make sense that nForce2 cant be used.

Makes perfect sense since NVIDIA decided to drop support for the chipset. They never even made Vista drivers for it.

As for documentation, there's plenty on Google.

Well the rest of the motherboard works great, runs faster than WinXP. Theres support somewhere, plus it passed the Windows 7 Compatibility test (it recommended upgrading the video card).

That makes plenty of mistakes and should not be trusted. It also says certain people running 8 series NVIDIA cards can't run Aero.

I'm doing you a favor by saving you time with information.