X600XT screen flicker when booting w/TV

[ncseng]

I put together a cheap HTPC using parts I had lying around, and used a Sapphire Radeon X600XT video card with S-Video in/out. After some messing around I got the latest Catalyst v7.2 drivers installed and set the resolution to 800x600 for use with my TV. The TV is an old-fashioned 27" Panasonic CT-27HL14 27" TAU Series TV (tube), not digital or plasma. Once WinXP Pro has booted up, the screen looks fine. The screen rolls vertically until XP has finished loading the display driver, however, so the text from the boot prompt and the WinXP boot logo screen are unreadable, and as a result so are bios settings. I think this is due to VGA mode during boot up, because I started WinXP in a safe mode that used standard VGA mode and Windows did the same thing until a reboot.

So, question is can I fix this somehow? Video playback in Windows looks as good as any DVD I've played on the TV so I'm happy with the video card other than during boot up. It would be nice not to have to lug a CRT over and plug it in every time I want to do something in bios though

Also, does anyone have any tips on setting up XP for viewing on such a small TV? For now, I have all the fonts set to 16 points so I don't go blind trying to read small text, but the text within some windows still doesn't get scaled up. I'm working on setting up Media Portal right now so that eventually I would only use the XP shell for maintenance tasks.

Thanks!

 

[AdamNesvick]

nope, you can't fix it.

as to lugging a CRT, get a 15" LCD for $100, greatest testing monitor in the world