On Saturday 05 July 2003 07:34 pm, you wrote:
> Friends of mine brought me a computer and wanted to see if I could
> figure out why it wasn't geting more than basic colors. It runs win95,
> she got it from her boss at work when they got new puters for the
> office. It has a VGA adapter, no video card inside. It also has two
> motherboards. One on the bottom and then a half board on top. The top
> board holds the ethernet cards and a modem. It only has 32 mg of
> memory. It runs fine but I have no idea how to get a video card in
> there. Do they make short cards. It has PCI slots (2) avail. How hard
> will it be to find one, if there is such a creature? They are trying
> to get is set up for her sister who has no puter and can't afford one.
> Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Maureen
What's going on is that the proper "driver" is not installed. Thus it's
using the generic VGA driver which only have 16 colors.
To find which driver you need you can look at the board and find a few other
chips (or bigger flat components) on the motherboard. (The motherboard is
the big one that has other card(s) plugged into it.)
Look on the biggest of these chips and you will find writing on them. They
will say who manufactured them and have a model number. Then you go to
f.ex. google and search using one set of numbers from that chip.
On an Intel chip it may say:
INTEL
PCIset
SB82437VX
L6442534
SU116
INTEL C R M '95
We know from here that it was made in 1995 and belongs to s series of chips
based on the 824 series of chips.
So you get to play detective a bit. If you search using the first row with
numbers in it on google. Something like this:
+SB82437VX +"video driver" +download
The plus sign says it has to include the following "word", and the quotes
says search for these exact words. If you don't get a result wich contains
the driver, you can always omit the plus sign for download as they may have
a graphics link with the word download and google cannot read that.
>From the search results you will now find a driver that is needed for that
chip set. Install it and it should now be able to use all colors.
You may need to read a few results from google before you find the right
one. Often it finds a bunch of messages from people searching for the same
thing and so you'll find people with the same problem. If you see two
entries in a row that has the same looking lines and the second one is
indented, read that one first as it is a reply to the first one. This way
you may end up reading someones reply with a solution to the question
'where can I find this driver'.
It should not take more than a couple of minutes to find. If not you should
stop and try another letter+numbers "word" from the chip.
--Steve
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 18:47:01 EDT