I really need help

Try this, see if it offers any hints...

Right click on "my computer" then click on "properties"

Click the "hardware" tab, then "device manager"

Have any of the icons got a yellow apostrophe next to them ?

You can also expand the "display adaptors" setting to see if the video card is detected correctly there. You can highlight it and check the properties for that too - it might indicate if there are any clashes or problems.

Finally, the only other suggestion I can think of would be to go to Start Run, and type "dxdiag" - it`ll run a directx utility and you can run a few tests. It might take a few seconds to start up, so don`t panic if it thrashes the hard drive for a while. It might give you a few ideas if there is something else wrong with the system.

One obscure fault where it would (IIRC) refuse to run certain tests would occur if the chipset driver hadn`t been installed properly - particularly with an AMD chipset on the motherboard. This isn`t likely to be an issue on a Dell machine though.

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