Video card not recognized - intermittent

[DieselTech]

I recently installed a Norwood Micro PCI card (ATI Radeon 9250, 256mb) into my old Celeron 400 system with onboard video. I disabled the onboard video, and the card worked fine, as I expected. The machine stays on most of the time, but I shut it down recently to install more memory and a Celeron 533 cpu. I did these 2 upgrades at different times, and after I installed the new memory (but before the cpu), the card wasn't recognized and the system reverted to the onboard video. I rebooted the system and it was fine. It was a few weeks before I did the cpu upgrade, and the system had been on the entire time. So, after the cpu, everything seemed fine at first. But, upon loading Netscape 8.1 to surf the net, the video acts up and then it crashes. The system reboots, and the video acts up again while using the mouse, then another crash. I shut it off, open the case, recheck everything to make sure that there's nothing obviuosly wrong, and boot it back up. No video from the card, only the onboard video. I reboot & check the BIOS settings - everything looks ok. I re-seat the video card in it's PCI slot & reboot - everything is fine. A little bit later, I shut the system down for a while so that I can use an IR thermometer to check the cpu temp, which is about 85 degrees farenheight. I boot it back up, and again, no video from the card, only onboard. I reboot and it's fine again. It seems as if the card is not being recognized intermittently. Here's what I'm thinking I should do:

1) remove the card & check the card connector edge as well as the slot connector, clean as needed
2) move the card to another slot & reset the BIOS (if not already handled by PnP)

I think the issue may be related to the card not making good contact. I don't think it's related to the new memory, as it acted up prior to that. Ditto for the cpu, although it seems to be more noticable since the cpu was replaced (but it's had more on/off cycles also). It's possible that it could be a defective card as well. I don't think that it's temp-related as I left the machine off for 8 hours today and it acted up when first booted this afternoon. I tried rebooting it 4 times to no avail, then gave the card a slight push with my thumb before it finally worked. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks!

[ski]

The PCI slots on that old system may have oxidized contacts if no cards had been installed in them. A rubber eraser works well for cleaning the contacts on the slots and the video card. You may also have to reseat the card a few times after cleaning the contacts.

[flanzig1]

That old of a mother board probably has an AGP 1x or 2x slot. Which runs at 3.3v and the new card may not run at that voltage. AGP 8x is .8v.

[DieselTech]

flanzig1 - no, no AGP slot. The mb is a Toshiba (a V3100-series), which was built by GVC. It has 3 PCI slots and 1 AMR slot (practically useless). It has onboard video (Intel - not sure the exact version, but I know the chipset is i810).

I have yet to take it back apart to clean the card/slot, but I think that is the next most logical step. I'll try the eraser method - I've actually heard of that before, now that I think about it. Thanks.

[glc]

It may be a marginally weak power supply. If I'm not mistaken, those Toshibas are micro ATX and use a wimpy PSU.