need some economy advice on upgrading.

[Casey]

So I think I fried my motherboard, because whenever I start it up it will not boot correctly, and it's asking for nvidia boot disk. THe motherboard itself is a lan party dfi ultra ii b and everything looks disoriented/ and words are semi-mispelled. The NVIDIA boot disk isn't working. And I have portable hard-drive, to where I can just pull my hard-drive out/in, so it's not the hard drive because I put my hard drive into my dad's hard drive and it works fine. I recently baught 512ram and a new graphics card radeon 9600 xt agp, and it's not that. I think it's the system bios, but I dont know what to do. I've disable few things here and there in the bios and it still wont work. And I plan on buying a new motherboard/power supply and need advice on what to buy at a non-expensive price. But before I do so does anyone know what it may be? I just think my computer is smurfed up...

[Samuraid]

Make sure that the cables on all internal devices are securely plugged in. If the motherboard cannot find any bootable devices (such as harddrives) due to a cable being loose, it may ask for a boot disk (the NVIDIA disk in this case).

Other than that, it could be a number of things likely relating to the motherboard. Check out MSI's boards as they tend to make good stuff.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813130473 (a little less featured than the DFI, but with a good pricetag)

As for a powersupply, antec makes good stuff, but you can find comparable PSUs made by Coolermaster that are less expensive and perform similarly.

[crono_logical]

Have you checked the BIOS is still trying to boot from the HD in the first place?

How do you mean semi-misspelled though? Perhaps it's asking for a boot disk because it's detected the BIOS has been corrupted and you need to reflash it with a good image.

[Casey]

Wellll it happened to be my video card. I dont know how the hell? But now it works, I guess the new video card is defected. I replaced it with my old one 9000 radeon sapphire, I think I may go return the video card and buy a power supply, and extra fan. My power supply may be bad, because my computer runs slow sometimes even with the 1024 ram it has...

[Yamaneko]

Did you uninstall your old video card drivers BEFORE installing the new video card?

[Casey]

Did you uninstall your old video card drivers BEFORE installing the new video card?

Yup. Then after two days it started acting weird.