I typed this once and lost it to hampsters. Damn hampsters.
Older computer, Pentium 3, running Win 98. Had a bad software conflict and lost computer for awhile.
We restored from the restore disk and all is well, except the video card may be having a conflict or it may just need drivers. The monitor works, but won’t show anything but 16 bit color, leaving the backgrounds quite garbled.
There is a new card installed but since installation the documentation has been lost. We don’t know what brand or model number. Is this listed on the card itself? Where? If I do have to download new drivers where is a good place to start looking?
Since we did a restore (not a format and restore), I would expect it wouldn’t have lost the drivers, but we may need to disable the old video card. I don’t have the computer in front of me right now, but I’ll be going home to it after work. How do I disable the video card? Ardred said he found a “remove” command, but he remembers a red X over the card when he used the computer previously.
Also, is restoring from the HP Restore disk the same as booting to DOS and doing a scanreg/restore?
Right click on My Computer and select Properties. Click on the Device Manager tab, click on the plus sign next to Display Adapters. This will tell you what driver is currently installed. Write it down, then search Google for the manufacturer’s site, look for Downloads or Drivers or Support, and download the corresponding driver. Go back to the Device Manager, highlight the display adapter, and hit the Remove button. Restart your computer; Windows will see the display adapter as new hardware and try to install the driver for it. It may find a copy already on the hard drive. If not, it will ask where to look for the driver. Use Browse to point the installer at the driver you downloaded (make sure it is unzipped already), and Windows should do the rest.
I usually find that when working with mystery hardware, it’s easier to extract the hardware and examine it all over for serial numbers. Write down names, anything printed on a “major” chip on the card, and anything written in foil or metallic lettering during the creation of the board. Also look for things like “v3.21”. Write these all down on a crib sheet, plug the hardware back in, and begin Googling strings that you found on the card. You can usually get a model name and number pretty quickly.
If the serial number is of the form “AD234567B12 - 000000001” try the string before the dash. The string after is likely your card’s unique serial number, whereas the first bit is probably the model’s production code. Once you’ve got a model name and number for sure, Google on those terms and see if you can find a manual or support site.
This avoids an error that would result from using an older, more generic driver that happened to support your hardware (but wasn’t actually tailored for it) and then upgrading to a newer, more specific driver that completely doesn’t support it.
I use this method with all second-hand hardware that I purchase. It works on PCI cards, AGP graphics cards, motherboards, hard drives, and damn near anything with a serial number. Happy hunting!
I went home, opened the case, found a few dead hampsters, cleaned them up and wished them a fond farewell, pulled the card, wrote down the pertinent info (ATI Rage 128, if you care), put everything back together and started her up.
Went to google. Typed in ATI Rage 128 driver download, hit “I’m feeling Lucky” Took me directly to the download page, downloaded for several minutes (55, I think) accidentally cancelled it, downloaded it AGAIN, installed, rebooted.
Voila.
I thought it would be that easy.
Now… why did the computer forget that driver and NOTHING else? Software and files installed and created since then were still there… as well as downloaded desktop themes and the like. Hmmm.
Scarecly a week goes by without me formatting some old computer or other, then reinstalling Windows; the two key items to note (before wiping the old installation) are the identities of the graphics card and the network card (at least these are the two bad guys with the kind of machines I deal with - modems and sound cards might also be the same, but I rarely deal with these.
Windows 98 hardly ever manages to identify the graphics card and instead, installs a standard VGA driver, capable only of 800x600 and 16 colours.
Only this week, I got a hand-me-down machine from my boss and in my haste to get going, I forgot to note the hardware details; I had to yank the cards and trawl the net for hours to find the correct drivers. A lot of cheaper graphics cards are very difficult to identify if all you have is the card.
When you did the restore, it restored the drivers for the hardware that was originally on the machine. Evidently you didn’t replace any other hardware that had drivers so that video driver was the only one affected by the restore.
I’ve have several instances of a computer suddenly reverting to the generic video driver for no apparent reason. I’ve always just chalked it up to fun with Windows glitches.
Actually, I’ve had a couple of instances where uninstalling a bit of (non-driver-related) application software seemed to mess up the device manager so thoroughly that when the machine was restarted, it detected and installed all the hardware again - even things like the PCI bus and hard drive controllers.
I do a bit of consulting and I hate opening up the PC to figure out what card is in it. This may be helpful in identifying the card. Go to a DOS prompt and type “Debug”. At the hyphen type “D C000:0010” (zeros no o’s) that should put you in range to see the cards ID, look to the right. After that press Q then Enter to quit. Here is an example.
Debug
D C000:0010
Q
If you don’t see anything that looks like a video card in the text try this range “C010:0000”
