I have a machine that whenever you restart it, it switches to 8 bit color depth on the windows video settings. Once you select 16 or 32 bit color, the option for 8 bit disappears.
Uninstalled and reinstalled drivers, no effect. Haven’t tried swapping out to a different video card yet, because it seems more like a settings issue than a hardware problem. The video card works fine in 16 and 32 bit mode, but the minute you reboot, back to 8bit.
Any thooughts on this stumper?
Its an Nvidia TNT2 AGP 32M video card and xp home.
Kind of a WAG here but it does sound like maybe a driver problem. I’d say maybe it has a problem with the driver while in 32bit mode, then you reboot and it redetects the card and resets the resolution. Remove the drivers via Add/Remove programs, get the latest version, reboot. If you still have the problem you’re back to swapping the card out.
I’ve seen something like this, although with a different brand of card. It was indeed the driver - even though the one I installed was absolutely by-the-book correct and up to date for the brand, chipset and OS, it just wasn’t going to work. My problem was solved by installing the manufacturer’s ‘all-in-one’ display management/driver software - I didn’t really want to do this because it was bloatware, but nothing else would work.
The other thing I’ve seen is that sometimes, Windows can insist on using the wrong driver files (this can happen if you initially install the wrong ones); once you’ve got past the “Windows doesn’t think this is the right driver” and forced it to install, it’ll spend the rest of the time insisting that you were right, hindering progress when you try to install the right ones.
I tried dealing with a case of that by identifying the driver files (in Device Manager), then booting into safe mode and removing the files and/or hacking the registry. This get messy fast and is usually doomed to failure (as it was in my case; I ended up having to backup, wipe, reinstall)
There is a great and powerful free utility called Powerstrip that gives you a whole lot more control over your video card than Windows gives you. It lets you specify default settings from withing Powerstrip too. I use it and it is a great addition. It stands a good chance of fixing your problem or at least making it so that you can hit a key to fix it.
I too recommend downloading the latest driver from the chipset manufacturer’s site (that’s Nvidia, not the company that actually made the card), removing the current driver, rebooting, and installing the newest one.
Video card drivers seem to be the flakiest of all drivers. Different versions can produce wildly different results in every flavor of Windows. For a while there, the various versions of the Nvidia reference drivers caused my FPS (the number of frames per second drawn on the screen; higher numbers are better when playing games) to bounce up and down like a yo-yo. They seem to be pretty stable these days, though.
This isn’t a common problem, so here are a couple of shots in the dark.
Some obscure Windows .dll may be corrupted. Run SFC /SCANNOW from the command line. You may be prompted to insert your Windows CD. It will scan all your Windows system files and replace any that have gone bad.
Remove and replace any drivers under the Monitors heading in Device Manager. They’re probably just the generic defaults, but maybe one of them is messed up.
Failing that, sometimes I’ve found that installing an older video driver can sometimes help, particularly with older video cards whose manufacturers tend to release “unified” drivers, like NVidia or Ati.
Unfortunately since this is not my machine, I do not have the windows disk. I’m going to go out tonight and try to resolve this on site. SFC does need something from the windows disks so this may be the problem. Will update when I get in.
Customer did not have windows disks :dubious: but happily consented to purchase a copy and allow a reinstall of XP home after backing up her personal files.
The original XP install was apparently an upgrade disk from Millenium to xp home :smack:
Whatever the problem was, a fresh install of XP cleaned it right up, machine working fabulously and turned over to a happy customer.
I love this job, always learning, and the boss thinks I’m brilliant.
