I'm not a hardware guy so I find this pretty confusing and maybe
someone can help. I'm trying to install a new video card (details
below) in my eMachines PC and step 1 of the instructions tell me to
"obtain and install the most updated AGP chipset driver" from the
manufacturer. I verified I have an Intel based AGP chipset but i can't
find what i need anywhere on the support.intel.com website. Do I
really need to do this step and where the frig is the driver that I
need?
Current hardware:
eMachine desktop T4155 (Pentium 4, 1.5 Ghz with a
32 MG GForce2 MX AGP card)
Installing: GForce MX 5200 AGP 128MB video card
(Step 2 states that I should uninstall the existing driver using
Add/Remove Programs, but I dont' see why I wouldn't do that using the
Device Manager under Control Panel -> System.... but I guess I 'll
cross that bridge next)
Help or ideas?
Your computer has an 845 chipset.
http://www.emachines.com/products/products.html?prod=T4155
I would remove the existing video card driver, while the old video
card was still in the computer. If you rebooted at that point,
the screen resolution would drop to 640x480. Then, I would shut
down, turn off the power, unplug the computer, and change the
video card. The new card will also come up in 640x480, until
you get some drivers in there.
You want to remove the driver via "Add/Remove", so the registry
is cleaned up properly. Just hammering it from Device Manager is
only a small part of the job the uninstaller will do. Also,
if the old card was Nvidia, and the new card was Nvidia, you
still uninstall the driver, as the installer will do something
different, for every kind of card installed. You want to give
the new installer a chance to set things up right.
On power up, you will need three things.
1) Chipset drivers. In the case of Intel chipsets, the package
is named INFINST.exe (there is also a ZIP version which is
useful for hacking). The chipset drivers change the names
seen in Device Manager, and you might see an AGP entry after
this is done. The OS or Service Pack you are using, may already
have installed chipset drivers, so this step could well be
redundant. (And in order for the old card to work in 3D properly,
the chipset drivers would have had to be there also.) But if
you want to look around, this would be a typical link:
http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df-external/Product_Filter.aspx?ProductID=757&lang=eng
2) Video card drivers for FX5200. They could be on the CD.
You can also check the Nvidia site, for more recent drivers.
http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp
3) DirectX9c can be installed at any time. The FX5200 installer
CD, may in fact attempt to install a version of DirectX
for you, before it attempts to install the Nvidia drivers.
You can install DirectX over and over again, without harm.
DirectX versioning prevents backtracking, so before applying
any DirectX installer, be aware that there could be consequences
from the upgrade (like maybe some old DirectX 5 game stops working
right). You can go to Microsoft and get a more recent version
than the one that is on the video card CD.
Generally speaking, the three steps above are self-enforcing.
For example, you could skip step (1), and try (2) and (3).
If you get an error message, telling you that something is
wrong, then you know that step n-1 was wrong, so you should go
back and fix it. The only thing you can really screw up, is the
bit about removing the old video driver. I've got myself in
an awful mess by forgetting to do that before changing cards.
I messed up one Win2K install so bad, that I could never get
DMA/DIME enabled on the new card. So don't forget to properly
uninstall the old driver first, before doing anything else.
Even after trying "driver cleaner" programs to remove the old
drivers, I still could not fix whatever the problem was.
(Hint - I'm the guy who hates to reinstall the OS, and I'll
do virtually anything to avoid doing so.)
HTH,
Paul