How do I update drivers for no-longer made card?

Factual Questions
1

OK, so I’ve been getting a super-ton of crashes lately. Most of the time it was when I tried to play World of Warcraft. Their tech support site said to uninstall, run scan disk amnd defrag, then reinstall and see if it works.

Well, I uninstalled, and never got to the scan disk part, cause I decided to run disk cleanup first. (Oh, and on that note…where is scandisk? Do I ave to run it from DOS, or something? I don’t see it in the system utilities menu.)

Well, I got a blue screen part-way through trying to do disk cleanup. The file it mentioned was nv4somethingorother.something, I can’t remember. But the nv4 tells me it’s my video card dirver files, plus, when I start windows, I get an erroe saying it can’t do something with the nv4something.dll.

So, I says to myself, I need to update drivers. Well…I can’t. My video card is a VistionTek GeForce Ti 4200. I go to ww.visiontek.com, and lo and behold…they’ve switched to only making ATI chipsets now, and I can not, for the life of me, find support for their older cards on the site. It’s like they just packed up and moved out of GeForce town and never looked back. Bastards. :mad:

So I look in google for ‘visiontek ti 4200 drivers’ and get mostly reviews of the card. I found this place, but it didn’t work. The driver I downloaded wouldn’t find the card to let me install the driver. Since maybe it’s only suppossed to be for computers from that company, and mine isn’t from that, it won’t let me install them?

Can I jsut install ‘generic’ GeForce drivers not specific to the manufactorer? Or will that just make things worse? I’d love to be able to say I still have the original install CD, but I’m sure I don’t.

2

You can download NVidia’s “generic” drivers to any GeForce- or TNT2-based card. They will almost undoubtedly work much better for your card.

ANything you can get from the NVidia website right now will be approximately 438,412 revisions newer than what you have.

3

On a related note the drivers at the chipmakers’ websites will always be the most current. I always update my drivers from ATi or Nvidia directly instead of screwing around with MSI and Sapphire.

4

As the others have said, ALWAYS go straight to the chipset maker (Nvidia in this case) for the drivers first. Heck, when you get a new card, just toss the driver disk they give you, and download the driver from the net right away.

5

If nothing else works, you can find just about any driver at drivers.com.

Of course, starting with the chip maker is definitely your first and best option. But dirvers.com is always my second stop.

6

Well, this morning I awake to find my PC at a blue screen. It wasn’t doing anything strenuous, it just crashed while being idela and signend onto AIM. Argh. i tried to download new drivers, but guess what? Yup, crash in the middle of download. Now, seeing as I get crashes randomly, and the memory address and the file it mentioend (when it mentions are) are all different, I would think it’s my memory. But I ran memtest last week (I think Thursday) and didn’t find a single error. Not one. Could there be communication problems between my memory and the rest of my system? On the motherboard, perhaps?

Oh well. I just want to make sure that whatever the problem is, it has no chance to carry over when I upgrade my system. Sometime next week, I will receive a new mobo + processor, new vid card, and new memory. So as long as the problem isn’t corrupted files on the HD, I should be fine, right?

7

Random crashing is almost always heat or power problems. Your video card might be over heating or your CPU. Either try to see your temp in Windows or through you BIOS. Check your fans.

Power is probably not the issue here unless you upgraded recently and have an underpowered PSU, are having brownouts or are not protected through a good powerbar.

8

I agree with badmana’s diagnosis – heat or power. A few corrections though: a power supply can also become underpowered with age, as its capacitors degrade. Cheap PSUs use cheap components and deliver marginally acceptable current on the critical rails; a component degradation might make your PSU go dodgy a little at a time.

With heat, you can use the shareware program Motherboard Monitor to check your component temperatures.

Memtest86 is a great way to figure out if something’s wrong with your RAM.

And of course, all of this assumes you’re not overclocking your system’s FSB speed, which can cause timing errors with RAM, PCI devices, or your video card, which is another source of random crash problems.

9

Yeah, memtest86 was what I ran last week to check my RAM, and it was OK.

My PSU was brand new about five months ago, so hopefully that’s not it. And it shouldn’t be underpowered, it’s at least 400W, though I might have gotten the 450W, I can’t remember.

As far as heat goes…maybe. I’m not overclocking anything (at least not to my knowledge.) Although a while back I did try to underclock my CPU, because in trying to play World of Warcraft, it was suggested as a way to stop in game crashes. However, when I tried to underclock, I couldn’t even boot up, so I removed my mobo battery to reset to default and booted that way, with my FSB the same it was when I first put my PC together, and I know I didn’t have to change it then. But, just to be safe, I’ll look at what both my system properties and BIOS say my CPU speed is, and check the FSB and multiplier.

It might just be a bad heatsink/fan, or maybe it came a little loose. I’ll use motherboard monitor to see what my temps are, both idle and pre-crash (since now I know anything using a lot of resources will crash, I’ll just start to defrag or somethnig like that while it’s running and keep on eye on the temp before the blue screen appears.)

I’m at work right now, so Ill let you all know how it turns out when I get home. Thanks for the suggestions.

10

Well…the temp it runs it is around 54 celcius during the BIOS (it actually locked up in the BIOS) and 55-57 idle in windows, and it went to 58 before it crashed. I did manage to get a new video driver installed, so I don’t get the dll error at starup, so progress is being made.

57 (where I’m at riught now) does seem hot, but supposodly my Athlon XP 1800 can go to almost 70 with no ill effect. Either AMD is lying, or that’s not the source of the problem. Here is the info from the last crash I got:

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Stop: 0x000000D1 (0X0008503C, 0X00000002, 0X00000003, 0XF52D9776)

NisDrv.sys address F52D9776 BANK AT F52C9000

11

Microsoft Support

12

Well, it’s officially dead. Dead as dead can be. I took it apart to clean it. Holy fuck was there a lot of dust! I mean a lot! Especially in the heatsink! Huge gobs of dust that I had to pick out with tweezers. So, I cleaned everything off, even used some alcohol on the heatsink core. I put some heatsink compound on the heatsink, and placed it back on the CPU. I booted up the system
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odd, the message stating my video card chipset is showing, but it’s not progressing…CRAP! I never plugged my CPU fan back into the motherboard! :eek: I turned it off as quickly as possible, hoping that maybe the few seconds it was on didn’t kill it, since it didn’t really do anything, right? Nope. Turned it back on, with the fan plugged in…same thing. I waited a minute or so and it didn’t get any further. In subsequent attempts, I didn’t even get the video card message on screen.

I am giving my CPU a viking funeral. Except instead of being lit on fire, it will be spat upon. And instead of being put on a boat and sent out to sea, it will be tossed in the trash.

13

Aren’t there some kind of environmental restrictions on how we do away with circuit boards? Anyway, sorry about the video card, bouv; tomorrow I’m going to try to get my friend’s ~10 year old NT system running with the brand-spanking new HP printer she’s bought. I look forward to much of the same.