Continuing our ongoing examination of the components of a standard personal computer, we?re going to look today at video cards.

The video card is the device, put simply, that converts the information being worked on inside the computer processor, into something that can be viewed and understood by us.

You will hear the term ?on-board? video adapter, which simply means that the video card is not a separate entity, and for convenience has been integrated with the main printed circuit board of the system.

If the blue socket, where you attach your monitor, is parallel with the printer (dark pink/purple) port, then your video adapter is on-board. If it is at right-angles to the printer port, then the video card is a separate entity.

Video cards are described thus ? ?A 128MB VGA Adapter?. The 128MB in this example, indicates the amount of memory, separate to that discussed in previous articles, that has been included on the video card.

Let me explain: Graphical manipulation of the type required for 3-D rendering in some of our PC games etc., requires an inordinate amount of memory in order to render correctly on your monitor.

Additionally, usually these games have to respond to your keyboard or joystick requirements (reload, turn and fire, throw grenade, for example), instantaneously.

If the job of rendering the 3-D display and the actions you require your character to carry-out, was left to the standard system memory, then the display would suffer ? and you would most likely get unacceptable staggering of the display, a time delay, and possibly reduction of colours or resolution.

This is because the standard system memory has other jobs to do besides service your graphical requirements.

In order to combat this, the display memory is handed-off to the memory included on the video card, which is dedicated purely to providing enough memory capacity for smooth, non-jerky, clear, high-resolution display.

Lets talk about a few of the acronyms involved here:

VGA, stands for Video Graphics Adapter, the simplest and most widely used graphics standard and ALL monitors support it;

XGA stands for Extended Graphics Array, and was introduced to allow for enhancements in monitor technology that could render a greater number of colours;

DVI, a relatively new innovation, stands for Digital Visual Interface, and was introduced to facilitate the birth of digital monitors and flat-panel displays. I will cover monitors in a later article.

VGA and XGA display adapter types are the usual ones you will find, and their connection is usually about an inch in length along one edge, and slightly shorter along the other, and is, nowadays at any rate, usually coloured blue.

DVI connectors are much squarer in shape, and are made up of one large four-way connection and three rows of eight smaller connections, and are just slightly longer than the VGA type connector.

The most frequent problem with Video Cards, usually stem from its capabilities being superior to those supported by the attached monitor.

Thus, if we ask the video card to deliver 16 million colours (I will deal with these kids of things in the future too), but the connected monitor doesn?t support it, we will suddenly end up with a system that works, but no display, so ultimately unuseable.

To get around this kind of common problem is a relatively simple job, but you will need to be sure that you are comfortable with it.

First, you must ask your computer to restart. Once the initial screen has been displayed, press and hold the F8 key, and you will be presented with several boot options.

One of them will be ?Safe Mode?, which you should select, and which will force your computer system to boot with all settings set at their minimum (ie just eight colours, with 640 x 480 resolution ? so everything will appear very barleg and ?blocky?), but, critically, your system should boot.

Once it is up, you need to ?right-click? on the background image, select properties, and you will be able to select the correct settings for your monitor.

Once done, select Apply, and ask your system to restart again. It will restart in ?Normal Mode? and your display should now be correct.

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