Hi,before I go choogling off to Ati for advice I was wondering whether some knowledgable soul here could help me with a little problem I'm having.Due to the mysterious dying habits of motherboards I had to (just yesterday) build myself a new (almost) computer. I was running a 478 socket with a 3.2P4 and a X800, 2GB ram and FS9.1. All was well until the fateful morning when upon punching the ON button on the pc all the pretty little lights came on..except for the monitor. Not even the BIOS screen. My assumption: dead mobo. Whatever...Not finding a decent 478 replacement I decided to forgo this year's holidays and build a newer,'better' pc.Many hundreds of euros later I was admiring my old Antec case playing host to an Asus P5WD2-E Premium (s775, i975x) a P4 920-D (3.0Ghz), 1 GB of Kingston's finest DDR2 and a PCI-express ATI X1600Pro (512MB). Old soundcard (Audigy2), and my old hard drives. Downloaded and installed the very latest Catalysts (6.6) off the Ati site. Everything looked good to go until I double-clicked on FS9.Zip. Nada. Just a little window informing me that: "Invalid Hardware or Driver Detected."Further investigation and running dxdiag gave me this little gem:"Hardware accelerated Direct3D 9+ is not available because the display driver does not support it. You may be able to get a newer driver from the hardware manufacturer."I'm running WinXP Home (SP1), DIrectX 9.0c. No other games on this machine so I can't cross-check.Over to you, hoping that you can help.Cheers,TonyP.S. anyone "upgrading" to a 775 socket better be prepared to invest in a new 24pin power supply as well :-fume

Tony - It sounds like you may be running with the WinXP install from the old system. If so, a simple reinstall of DirectX9c may fix the problem but a reformat and complete reinstall of WinXP may be required to get everything sorted. If you have already reinstalled WinXP try just reinstalling DirectX9c.Doug

hi Doug,yes, I was running the old WinXP installation but had to run the repair function because windows refused to start, initially. After that it started up correctly and I did do a new 9.0c install as well.I realise that a format and new installation is my best bet but I have so much stuff (a multitude of programmes and intricate settings to get things to run smoothly) that I honestly do not have the courage (nor the elephantine memory needed) to set it all up from the beginning. Not to mention lost keys and passwords..hehI do have a spare hard drive taking a breather so I may just try to undertake your suggestion when I can work up the energy.Many thanks for your response!Cheers :-beerchug Tony

Unfortunately, it's a rather rare occurrence when everything on an old WinXP install works properly after an extensive hardware change. Some folks have had success in keeping the old installation but most of us have had to resort to a reinstall. One thing you might want to try is uninstall the video drivers, reboot, reinstall the drivers, reboot, and then reinstall DX9c and reboot. The problem you're having is that DirectX can't find the video drivers and reinstalling DX9c last in the sequence sometimes helps. Luck...Doug

You cannot and shouldn't use an old OS install with a new mobo. It is definitely not recommended and I head a team supporting 40k workstations. Your only choice is the painful task to back it all up. Trust me, I know the pain, because I just finished upgrading my systems at home.G'luck