Hmmm....

[Gizmo]

Hey guys,

Now, this could well be a one off thing and I hope it is. I was just browsing another forum that I go to and went to a particular section with lots of photos and pictures and realised that some or maybe even most were slightly blurry. I found this weird and decided to restart. After that, it was all back to normal again. Could this be something to do with a controller or device driver of some sort? I went into my Device Manager and found yellow "?"'s with yellow "!"'s on the top on both my Video controller and my USB controller. Those signs have been there all the time ever since I got the computer. Is there an actual problem somewhere or was this a one off? Please say it was a one off lol

EDIT: I was thinking that it could be some sort of temporary glitch with AOL (my ISP) because I had to restart it a little earlier before this happened.

TIA...

[Wobblybob]

if the yellow signs have been there since you bought the pc, and especially on the usb and video controllers it sounds like the mobo drivers were never installed properly. try running the chipset disc supplied with your motherboard, or downloading from any suitable driver site. this might solve the prob.

[Gizmo]

Ok. Well, I'm not going to do that now because I'm tired, I have a headache and it's 1:30AM lol Anyone with any other ideas are welcome and very much appreciated between now and the time I try installing the drivers for those particular devices. Thanks Wobblybob

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the items that have the yellow "?" and "!"'s on them were under the "Other Devices" list which has a big yellow "?", but not with a yellow "!". Lol, that detail might not be needed but I'm going to give it anyway.

[Mesaeus]

I'm beginning to think you've been using the standard vga controller all that time. Windows XP is different from the other Windows versions in that the standard VGA driver (which gets installed if Windows doesn't have a driver for your video card) can give you true color at 800x600, which is definitely a step up from the 640x480 with 16 colors of the previous versions. Those made the image look so bad, everyone would install the correct drivers right away. In Windows XP, the only thing noticeable about the VGA mode is that everything is drawn rather slowly (no acceleration at all) and that it's always flickering slightly (only 60 hertz supported).

In any case, you'll probably need the motherboard drivers AND a driver for the video card.

So let's start by determining what motherboard you've got, please download Everest Home and run it, it will give you (among other info) the name of your motherboard.

[Gizmo]

Hi Mesaeus. It's a Mercury motherboard, which has everything onboard, there are no expansion cards. I know that from reading the box that it came in when the friend who built it for me dropped it off. I have the motherboard disk to go with it too. Maybe I should just install the appropriate drivers for those flagged devices?

EDIT: I remember when I first logged onto the system, the colours and resolution quality were originally set to 32-bit. I pulled it down to 16-bit because it was making pictures come up on the screen a little slow. I thought this was because the monitor couldn't take the refresh rate at 32-bit. Anyway, I'll wait for the go ahead to install the drivers to the devices/controllers that are flagged.

[glc]

How about a model number of the motherboard? That's the only way to research what the video chip and the other onboard components are.

[Gizmo]

All I know, besides the brand name of the motherboard, is that it has a VIA Samuel 2 chipset. I browsed the motherboard disk that I have and came across the VIA chipset drivers for the VGA controller (I think). Should I run the disk and install the drivers to the flagged devices/controllers yet?

[Gizmo]

Aha! I think I solved it. I just ran the driver install and let XP search for the drivers for the flagged devices, watched as it installed the appropriate ones and then completed. The screen went black for a moment, and that was the point where my heart sank because I thought I was gonna get a BSOD. It did it again but no BSOD and then I saw that XP had found the drivers for the VGA controller from my motherboard disk. I don't get why the friend of ours never installed the drivers from the motherboard disk in th first place. That's kinda annoyed me now lol. All this time that I've had the computer and I never even stopped to think to see if all of my drivers were completely installed. Now that they are, everything is sooo much better!

Thanks for all the help guys!