Geforce FX 5200 Trials and Tribulations
An off-hand purchase on the day after thanksgiving brought into my possession a relic Nvidia Geforce FX 5200 Graphics card. This piece of hardware has an obsolecent 3rd generation chipset along with 256 mb of memory. Though the FX-5200's core technology is two generations behind the curve, my existing onboard Savage S3G is four full generations behind. Thus, even the FX-5200 represented a significant boost to my main machine's graphics processing capabilities. Besides which, with a price tag of only $37, who could refuse such an offer !?!
So with cheerful spirits I set about at once to install the card. This turned out to be a bit of a post holiday nightmare. I plugged the card into the motherboard, so far so good. But after switching the Graphics Adaptor mode to PCI in the BIOS and loading the new adaptor driver, my entire OS defaulted back to VGA 4-bit color mode. My desktop looked like some kind of modern art masterpiece by a color-blind 2nd grader! After some digging, I realized that the latest post Service Pack 2 Windows XP required the switching of adaptors at the OS device manager level, so I did that, and...and Windows refused to boot up!!!
At that point, I switched back to my onboard graphics card just to load the OS. After some research it was realized that Windows had a bug where graphical adaptor installations could be corrupted if the OS had some form of security turned on during the installation, I unfortunately had Norton running. So I disabled security, uninstalled the graphics driver and repeated the installation process, only to get back to the 4-bit color scheme again!!! Apparently, after more research, I had to flip a hardware switch on my physical motherboard to fully switch from onboard to PCI mode.
So after doing all of that work, I found out that the OS had default again to 4-bit color mode. Now the reason was because the latest update to Windows XP had made it incompatible to the driver software that had shipped with the hard. So then I downloaded the absolute latest driver from NVidia and installed that, and it was STILL incompatible!!! X(
Finally, after more research it was realized that the latest Geforce driver had a fix patch to fix a specific memory leak caused by the latest security fixpack updates to Windows XP. So finally, after 3 days of tweaking, I was rewarded with crystal clear 32-bit graphics that looked far richer than what I had before.
So with cheerful spirits I set about at once to install the card. This turned out to be a bit of a post holiday nightmare. I plugged the card into the motherboard, so far so good. But after switching the Graphics Adaptor mode to PCI in the BIOS and loading the new adaptor driver, my entire OS defaulted back to VGA 4-bit color mode. My desktop looked like some kind of modern art masterpiece by a color-blind 2nd grader! After some digging, I realized that the latest post Service Pack 2 Windows XP required the switching of adaptors at the OS device manager level, so I did that, and...and Windows refused to boot up!!!
At that point, I switched back to my onboard graphics card just to load the OS. After some research it was realized that Windows had a bug where graphical adaptor installations could be corrupted if the OS had some form of security turned on during the installation, I unfortunately had Norton running. So I disabled security, uninstalled the graphics driver and repeated the installation process, only to get back to the 4-bit color scheme again!!! Apparently, after more research, I had to flip a hardware switch on my physical motherboard to fully switch from onboard to PCI mode.
So after doing all of that work, I found out that the OS had default again to 4-bit color mode. Now the reason was because the latest update to Windows XP had made it incompatible to the driver software that had shipped with the hard. So then I downloaded the absolute latest driver from NVidia and installed that, and it was STILL incompatible!!! X(
Finally, after more research it was realized that the latest Geforce driver had a fix patch to fix a specific memory leak caused by the latest security fixpack updates to Windows XP. So finally, after 3 days of tweaking, I was rewarded with crystal clear 32-bit graphics that looked far richer than what I had before.
posted by Ke Xu at 10:54 PM
1 Comments:
dude! I cannot believe that you bought this stupid video card, you must return it at once and start working on building a new machine. nuff said!
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