After installing a bunch of new software and trying to troubleshoot some problems absolutely nothing shows up on my screen when I attempt to boot up. I installed a 3DFX Voodoo3 2000 card in my P200 MMX PC and recently bought a cheapie $2 CD that had various utilities and demos. After installing the latest Windows Media Player and DirectX 8, nothing displayed on my monitor upon reboot until it opened up Windows…not even DOS! I uninstalled Media Player but couldn’t find DirectX 8 to uninstall. Then, foolishly, I decided to uninstall the 3DFX drivers and reinstall from the CD. However, in the process of doing so the computer crashed and I had to reboot again but this time absolutely nothing shows up because I deleted the drivers! Not even Windows! How can I fix it if I can’t see anything? What can I do?

It seems that you do have quite a problem! Whenever Windows cannot boot properly, the first thing that you should try, is booting into Safe Mode. Windows Safe Mode is a special diagnostic mode of Windows which only loads the minimal drivers and devices necessary for Windows to basically function. In the case of your video problem, a generic (and very basic) video driver should be loaded, in order to give you a display. To boot in Safe Mode, reboot your computer and when the ‘Windows 9x Starting…’ message appears (just before the Windows splash screen) press the F8 key (if no such message appears, press and hold the F8 key just before the splash screen appears). This will bring up the Windows bootup menu. From this menu select and enter ‘Safe Mode’. You mentioned previously that nothing appeared on your monitor before Windows opened. I am not quite sure what you mean because at the very least the POST (power on self test) should come up on your monitor no matter what has happened, since the POST is completely independent of Windows. If absolutely nothing appears before Windows, then you will have to take your computer to a computer repairer as this is very strange behavior for which I, quite honestly, wouldn’t have a solution. Anyway, back to Safe Mode. Assuming all has gone well, you should be at the Windows desktop which looks very strange (don’t worry: remember only a very basic video driver has been loaded). Now you can insert your 3DFX cards driver CD and install!