Hey all,

I have a crappy eMachine el1358g-51w, i have upgraded the ram to 8gb, and the power supply to 300w. I bought a pny Nvidia Geforce gt 430. I followed the instructions from the pny manual and it said to go into the bios and disable the integrated graphics and make the graphics card in the pci slot the main output. Well there is not an option in the bios that lets me do that. I checked the manual for the computer and it said that there should be one but its not there. I have looked throughout the bios, every option. Nothing. I am at a loss. I do not know what to do. I have done many other things to try to get it to work but to no avail. Also when the card is in the slot and I have the computer on the fan on the card itself is on, yet it is not in the device manager, and the computer doesn't even recognize it's in. I mean if it can draw power from the psu why doesn't it register as in the computer. I am really in need of some assistance. Can anyone help me at all? I've posted it on Yahoo Answer but no luck so far.

See if the eMachines web site (http://support.gateway.com/us/en/emac/product/default.aspx?tab=1&modelId=3689)has any answers. Just because the Graphics card states you have to change the setting in your Bios does not necessarily mean you will be able to do this on your PC. Each PC is different. This graphics card is designed to work with many different PC's, and will not always work with every PC. You might be out of luck.

I love that term, "crappy eMachine".......funny!

The eMachine was built to fill a need at the very bottom of the PC market.
It was never built to be a gamers' delight or a real power house.
I currently have five of them, under my workbench, in various levels of disrepair.

Initial problems include, cheap WD drives, low ram, insufficient PSU's and those cheap Chinese capacitors on the motherboard.
You may also find either AMD Sempron or Intel Pentium 4 processors. Low cost, but Not high performers.

So I'm not surprised that the little PC won't work with an add-on video card.
You might even look to see if eMachine offers a Bios Upgrade for that PC.
I won't be surprised if they don't.

Is that card a PCI, or a PCIe?
If it's PCI, it should be plugged into the slot closest to the CPU.

A little trick I might try, , , remove all power from the PC and remove the CMOS Battery.
Leave it out for about a half hour and if it's over four years old, get a new one.
Then put the battery back in, (Then plug in the new video card.) restore line power and press the correct key to go into the Bios.
Set the time and date and then take "Default Settings".
During that process, the Bios may 'find' the new card and present it to Windows.
It's always worth a try.

Good Luck!
TechnoMage :cool:

PS: Remember "Google" can be your best friend when trying to resolve problems with your PC.
I Googled your model # and got many hits. Here's just one, where the video card upgrade is discussed. Your power supply may not be sufficient to power up your new card.
EL1358G-51w Emachines Upgradable? - Tech Support Forum (http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f24/el1358g-51w-emachines-upgradable-589960.html)

Low power PSU's could well be the #1 problem with eMachines, and any brand MINI computer.

Read the following article, it may help you.

How To Install Graphics Card Drivers On Windows 8

We have been playing around with Windows 8 for quite sometime now and the Consumer preview is also available for download by public. You can also try out Windows 8 consumer preview on your computer by downloading it from Microsoft official website here. In this article, I will guide you step by step on how to Install Graphics Card Drivers On Windows 8. I f your computer has a basic Intel chipset drivers or other basic drivers, it will most probably be automatically installed, but if you have a graphics card installed on your PC, then you will need to install the drivers to get the optimum display quality and screen resolution on your Windows 8 Desktop or Laptop. If you don’t install the graphics card drivers on a PC equipped with a graphics card hardware, you will observe poor and slow graphics and sluggish graphics quality. In this tutorial, I will use my Windows 8 HP Laptop with an Nvidia graphics card for the demonstration purpose, this same tutorial applies for the ATI and other brands of graphics cards as well.

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Step By Step Guide To Install Graphics Card Driver On Windows 8

Installing a graphics card on Windows 8 is simple like installing any other software driver, but there maybe some small troubles or glitches in the process which we explain you during this tutorial. Read on for details:

Step 1: Identify your graphics card manufacturer and model number – This can be little tricky, the simplest way to do this is to check your computer’s model number (in case of a branded PC), and search on Google or some search engine about the graphics card hardware. If it is a self assembled PC or after market assembled PC, you can get the graphics card details by running a utility like GPU-Z or manually using this tutorial to identify unknown devices. In my case, it was a Nvidia 9200M GS hardware as per the laptop model number.

Step 2 : On Windows 8 start screen, click Desktop and Open Internet Explorer on the Desktop. Go to the graphics card manufacture official website. In my case, I went to the Nvidia official website and then went to the drivers section. Select the Graphics card make and version of Windows 8 (32 bit or 64 bit) and find the drivers.

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image – Click on Desktop

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image – Launch IE

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Image – Open Graphics Card Driver Official Website and go to Drivers Section

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image – Manually select the Driver by graphics card make and select Windows 8, 32 bit or 64 Bit whichever is installed on your computer

Step 3: Most Graphics card manufacturers have already released windows 8 drivers, so you should not face any problem to get a driver for Windows 8. Once located, download and save the driver to a folder on your computer like you save any other download file. Wait until the driver downloads, it may take few minutes to few hours depending on your Internet connectivity speed.

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image – Download the driver

Step 4 : Run the saved driver setup file – Now this step may not be as easy as it sounds. In my case, when I started Windows 8 driver installation, the file did not work and there was a black command prompt screen with error that “file is too big to launch in memory” and the screen disappeared in a flash and the process stopped. Some installers, like Nvidia come as an extractor package which first extracts and then installs. So what you can do with such failing extractors is that you run them on a Windows 7 or Windows Vista PC if you have access to them, it will extract the files but the setup will not proceed as the driver is not meant for Windows 7 or Windows Vista. But the extraction will be successful on older Windows PC. Note down where the files are being extracted and then copy the setup files from that location using a pen drive and then run the setup file on Windows 8 PC from the Pen drive. To run the setup, right click on the setup file and click “Run as administrator”

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image – Path or location where Windows 8 drivers are being extracted

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image – Run Graphics card setup file as administrator

If all goes well, the installation will start and you can proceed with the steps.

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image- Graphics card installation on Windows 8

During the installation, you may see a Windows Security warning related to installation of new device, select install to continue.

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image – Click install on security warning

And this is pretty much it, soon the installation will complete and you will see a completion message.

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image – Windows 8 Graphics Card Driver Installed Successfully.

After the driver is installed, you will see an instant improvement in graphics quality, display resolution options and on right clicking on desktop, you will also see graphic card control panel option.

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This will make Windows 8 a much more pleasing OS when the graphics render fast and smooth as they should.

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image – Optimum graphics resolution on Windows 8 Laptop

That's all. I hope this tutorial will be helpful to you.

Another thread about an old version. Closed