Joshua Franklin said:
Hello everyone,
I'm borrowing a computer my friend built and I don't know
what kind of video card he used. It's a Celeron 1.7GHz
w/376 MB RAM. The Device Manager has a question mark
next to "Video Controller (VGA Compatible)" and the
computer is incredibly sluggish for the processor and
bus. Is there a program that can detect what type of card
I'm using so I can go get a driver for it? I don't know
much about the Windows OS because I'm used to the MacOS
so I'm a bit lost.
Hi Josh,
Sounds like the system is using the Windows XP SuperVGA driver, which looks
superficially OK (i.e, more than VGA resolution, more than 16 colours, etc)
but is incredibly slow, especially when dragging large windows around the
screen.
Can you open up the PC case? That would make it a lot easier to identify the
graphics vendor.
Assuming you can't..
The three main graphics chipset suppliers are ATI, NVidia and Intel (and
hundreds of board / card vendors using their chipsets). There are others,
but the chances of them being in your system are relatively small.
First, look at the VGA connector on the back. Is it on an AGP card, or on
the motherboard? If the latter, then you've got onboard graphics. Nvidia
have never done an onboard graphics chipset for the Pentium 4 / Celeron, so
that rules them out. ATI only recently started offering chipsets, so they're
unlikely too. The most likely candidate for the graphics chipset
manufacturer would be Intel; their drivers are available from:
http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/Product_Filter.asp?ProductID=1044
The drivers at the above link will work with all recent Intel integrated
graphics chipsets (845G family and 865G).
If the VGA connector is on an add-in card, then the graphics will probably
be by ATI (40% likelihood) or NVidia (~50% likelihood).
Try the Nvidia drivers first:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_52.16
Download them and run the installer, then reboot when prompted. If the PC
does NOT have Nvidia graphics, no harm will be done; the Nvidia driver files
will copy to the hard disk, but won't be activated. If it DOES have Nvidia
graphics, then after installing the drivers you should have much better
graphics performance.
If the Nvidia drivers didn't work, try the latest ATI Radeon family drivers:
http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/winxp/radeonwdm-xp.html
If I recall correctly, the ATI drivers will refuse to install if they don't
find a supported card/chip in the system.
Hope this helps..?
