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Alli needs drivers in a bad way


Darren Kitchen

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Alli's laptop (or one of the 3 she's gone through in the last 2 months) is throwing a fit. It turns out we've finally isolated the problem thats been plaguing the laptops all this time. At first we thought it was the graphics board going bad, or the connection to the LCD panel.

Anyway, whats happening is that anytime direct3d or opengl is used the screen freaks out. It looks like static on an LCD, but its not discoloration, just the pixels moving out of place horizontally. It only happens when using direct3d (or possibly direct draw too), as well as opengl. We thought it was an intermittent problem but figured it out yesterday when setting up a game. The screen would freak out but as soon as I hit quit it would go back to normal.

So, my best guess is borked bits. Puppy needs some new drivers. Here are the details. I'd much appreciate any input, leads, links, suggestions, etc.

Gateway 450ROG notebooks with ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics cards running XP SP2. Currently running driver version 6.14.10.6343 from 4/28/2003 which we downloaded from support.gateway.com based on the notebooks serial number. I've checked ATI's site with no luck and even tried the latest catalyst drivers (even though I know desktop drivers dont work on notebooks). Its possible that rage3d might have updated or hacked drivers.

Thoughts?

Oh, and if you figure it out we'll ship Alli out to ya for a night. ;)

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Very sweet utility. I tried it out on Alli's notebook and got the latest ATI drivers on her system smoothly. Started up the game and had the same problem. I guess it's not a driver issue. Now I'm at a loss. :(

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Again, I'd recommend old versions too because new versions can cause problems with certain 3D apps...

Eg: I was in to N64 emulation a few years back and a popular emulator called Project64 was working great until I updated my graphics drivers and Pj64 started giving me garbage in the 3D rendering... same happened with the next few versions of the drivers but the older ones worked great.

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If you can find the setting for it you could try disabling the W-buffer (or enabling it if it already is disabled) since that can mess things up on those cards. The w-buffer is just a fancy version of the z-buffer (depth calculations) so it is completely safe to try.

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I had a similar issue with my desktop Nvidia 6800gt. It turned out to be the video card was messed-up. As far as my guess is it might be the video card in the notebook. My advice would be to speak with the tech support of that company, (i know tech support is noobish) but what ever gets the job done with out a head ache.

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I've had the exact same thing Alli's having happen on my brothers desktop machine which took a few beers and alot of time to finally get back to normal.

It was a driver problem, possibly with how DirectX and the Nvidia drivers were installed but i'll never know. Only solution was to uninstall the NForce drivers and revert back to the original DirectX that shipped with that version of XP and install DX9c then the latest NForce drivers on top of that.

Perhaps you could try the same thing with the laptop, its probably a DX problem if it happens with two different GFX Card manufacturers.

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Alli's laptop (or one of the 3 she's gone through in the last 2 months) is throwing a fit. It turns out we've finally isolated the problem thats been plaguing the laptops all this time. At first we thought it was the graphics board going bad, or the connection to the LCD panel.

Anyway, whats happening is that anytime direct3d or opengl is used the screen freaks out. It looks like static on an LCD, but its not discoloration, just the pixels moving out of place horizontally. It only happens when using direct3d (or possibly direct draw too), as well as opengl. We thought it was an intermittent problem but figured it out yesterday when setting up a game. The screen would freak out but as soon as I hit quit it would go back to normal.

So, my best guess is borked bits. Puppy needs some new drivers. Here are the details. I'd much appreciate any input, leads, links, suggestions, etc.

Gateway 450ROG notebooks with ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics cards running XP SP2. Currently running driver version 6.14.10.6343 from 4/28/2003 which we downloaded from support.gateway.com based on the notebooks serial number. I've checked ATI's site with no luck and even tried the latest catalyst drivers (even though I know desktop drivers dont work on notebooks). Its possible that rage3d might have updated or hacked drivers.

Thoughts?

Oh, and if you figure it out we'll ship Alli out to ya for a night. ;)

Dude your f**D ok not quite but ATI is a royle pain when it comes to their moble stuff and I have one of them I have ben ripping my hair out for ages over this because I lot the stupid recovey disk , I do have a set that sorta works if you wnat to try them but I have the 9500.

but yeah you perty much coved all the other problems.

aim me and ill give you the ones i have to try

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even tried the latest catalyst drivers (even though I know desktop drivers dont work on notebooks)

I know this my seem kinda obvious, but why didn't you try the catalyst mobility drivers rather than the desktop ones?

https://support.ati.com/ics/support/KBAnswe...uestionID=19546

Oh, and if you figure it out we'll ship Alli out to ya for a night. ;)

Meh, how about Jenn Cutter. A girl with her own show about video games, now that's hot!!

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