Graphics card laptop malfunctioning?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Hans Kamp
  • Start date Start date
H

Hans Kamp

I have a laptop with an nVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go 64M. But World of Warcraft
that uses 3D causes a graphical failure. The game crashes and totally messes
up the Desktop.

There are two possibilities:
1. The installed driver is too old; 8th of January 2003. But where can I
find a more recent driver? I only dare to install a driver if the name of
the card for which it is for, is exactly the same of the name of the
(simulated) card in the laptop. So the name must be nVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go
64M. When I install a driver from the official nVIDIA site, nothing happens
(after downloading, installing and rebooting the laptop). The same old
driver (1/8/2003) is still being used.

2. There might be a hardware failure. The 3D engine of the laptop might be
corrupted. Other games (Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and possibly Dungeon Siege)
doesn't mess up the appearance of themselves and/or the Desktop. In that
case I must have my defective laptop repaired.

First I assume that possibility 1 is the case now. I go to possibility 2 if
I successfully installed the new driver, and the card still shows its
failure in processing 3D-commands.
 
Pen said:
You won't be able to get an updated driver as long as you
insist on the *same name*.
NVIDIA drivers are backwards compatible. Get the latest
version for your flavor of windows and try that. You can always
revert to your present driver if that doesn't help.
http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp
Click to expand...

In that case: What drivers are compatible with the name of the card that I
mentioned?
 
In that case: What drivers are compatible with the name of the card that I
mentioned?
Click to expand...


They *all* are, nVida released an all-inclusive driver.

First, check whether your laptop is running the latest
DirectX version. Navigating to Start (button) -> Run ->
(type) "dxdiag" will show you which version of DirectX
you're running currently. The current version (AFAIK) is
9.0C . You can find the most current DIrectX at
Microsoft's website by doing a simple search.

Then on nVIdia's 'site, you want the downloads page, and
"Graphics Driver", "Geforce and TNT2", and (your operating
system version).

It is curious that after the last driver installation
attempt, that you saw no change in the driver number.
Typically the driver installation files will be placed in a
folder on the system partition, for example,

C:\NVIDIA\WinXP-2K\66.93\setup.exe

would be ran to install the driver after decompressed from a
zip or self-extracting executible to the default path.

"66.93" being substituted by the version number of the
driver you've just downloaded, and of course "WinXP-2K" by
"Win9xME" or similar if/when running those older operating
systems.

Note that many games simply have bugs which will cause
problems regardless of the video driver version. In such
cases the best resolution is a game patch from the game
developer in addition to newer video driver and directX
version.
 
kony said:
They *all* are, nVida released an all-inclusive driver.

First, check whether your laptop is running the latest
DirectX version. Navigating to Start (button) -> Run ->
(type) "dxdiag" will show you which version of DirectX
you're running currently. The current version (AFAIK) is
9.0C . You can find the most current DIrectX at
Microsoft's website by doing a simple search.

Then on nVIdia's 'site, you want the downloads page, and
"Graphics Driver", "Geforce and TNT2", and (your operating
system version).

It is curious that after the last driver installation
attempt, that you saw no change in the driver number.
Typically the driver installation files will be placed in a
folder on the system partition, for example,
Click to expand...


I already followed the steps that you mentioned above. I installed a
slightly different driver GeForce4 MX 440, that finally totally solved my
problem. No unwanted polygons and colors, no crashing, and no messed-up
Desktop. The driver is from 29th November 2004 (the previous one was from
8th January 2003).

Thanks anyway for your help. :)
 
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