Nvidia laptop hardware problems

September 9, 2006 1:15 PM

My laptop's NVidia video hardware doesn't work right anymore for certain display modes, and I have no idea why.

I'm running XP on a Compaq Presario R3000 laptop with an NVidia GeForce4 420 Go 32M built in, and when it goes to certain video modes, I simply get untextured squares instead of, for example, anything else. I'm not TOO up on my video modes knowledge, but I can say that the games "Mono" and "Every Extend" both display this problem, and given that one appears to be running in 2D mode and the other in 3D mode, I don't know if it's a rendering issue or what.

Furthermore, I seem to be unable to upgrade my drivers, as no matter what I download from NVidia's site, it tells me that it didn't find compatible hardware installed to install drivers for. I've tried using the HP/Compaq pre-installed system diagnostic doowacky, but all that did was show me a link to an old set of video drivers that accomplished nothing.

posted by DoctorFedora to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Deal with the driver problem first, so that you can back up your assertion that the "video hardware doesn't work right." Right now that's an assumption, but since you haven't actually sorted out your driver problems, it's probably a bad one.
posted by majick at 1:55 PM on September 9, 2006

You'll probably need to obtain the driver from the notebook manufacturer rather than Nvidia themselves. Here is the driver downloads page for the Presario R3000 (AMD).
posted by ed\26h at 2:43 PM on September 9, 2006

Response by poster: I have upgraded to the most recent drivers, at least according to Compaq/HP's web site, but I still have the same issues with things being rendered, if at all, as featureless squares. What on earth is going on?
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:45 PM on September 9, 2006

Your laptop's LCD screen can only run at certain fixed display modes corresponding to its TFT transistor matrix and LCD pixel organization. If your games are calling for resolutions and color depths at frame rates your screen hardware can't reproduce, you aren't going to get sensible output. BAck in 2002, at anything more than 800 X 600 X 32 resolution, Anandtech seemed to think some game makers make far better use of the hardware acceleration than others.
posted by paulsc at 7:21 PM on September 9, 2006

Response by poster: Well, the problem is that these display modes used to work until recently, when they started getting all weird and untextured-square-intensive. I honestly have no idea what's going on with it.
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:24 PM on September 9, 2006

I’m not entirely sure what untextured squares actually means but I’m guessing you’re seeing polygons not being rendered properly or something like that. In this case it could well be, as you say, hardware related; like overheating or just generally dying. I suppose you could try defluffing the fan for the GPU if there is one, installing the latest DirectX and/or updating the firmware if possible. Although those, barring the first, are fairly last-ditch suggestions.
posted by ed\26h at 3:21 AM on September 10, 2006