A friend was sent a free PC from another friend out of state. It's an e-machine, probably about 2 years old. Seems to boot just fine, but the onboard video sends nothing out at all. Tried it tonight with my monitor & same thing happens. The guy who sent it out had it sitting around & doesn't remember if it was working or not when he stuck it in the closet a year ago.

My guess is he had the on board video disabled in BIOS, and was using an AGP vid card which he pulled when he stopped using it (the spacer was removed, but no agp card installed). I tried sticking an AGP card in there, but didn't get any signal from it either.

Since it shows no video at all I can't try to fix the BIOS settings. I did try pulling the battery off the mb for 10 minutes, hoping to reset BIOS to factory settings. Any other ideas about what might cause this, or what I could have him try before he takes it in to a shop?

 

Sometimes the battery needs to be pulled for much longer than that to reset the BIOS. Google the motherboard and see what you can find concerning that. Otherwise, I have no clue.

 

Open it up and look at the motherboard. There might be a jumper setting that was changed to disable the on-board video.

 

Also, the CMOS (BIOS) battery could be so old it needs to be replaced.

 

I looked & couldn't find the jumpers, decided to give up. I think he's going to take it in & have it looked at.

Thanks for all the suggestions though!