Nee help from someone who knows computers!!

[Domination]

Ok well i swappd out my hardrive with one that i had n another somputer that i wasn't using because my previous one went down the crapper but neways the coloronly gos to 16 bit and its really messin with me ts all distorted and stuff i need 256bit i was told i need ti reinstall my video card and updatethe drivers for it but i haveno clue on how to do that so i need someone to help me out with it id really apreciate it

 

[wdavidhicks]

If your old hard drive died I guess it was impossible to check the device manager to see what kind of a video card it was. Look on the card itself for numbers. I don't know how old your computer is. You might have on-board video. Windows 2000 recognizes a surprising amount of hardware.

Anyway, download your drivers from here.

http://www.driverguide.com

The username is "drivers", password is "all". It's not a big secret.

[edit] I'm actually telling you to go here because you mention only 256 colors and I figure that must be an older machine with a legacy video card that's probably no longer supported.

 

[Domination]

ok well once it gets t the internal components of computers i couldnt find anythingto save my life so whaty does a vid car look like oh and i have have win 98 not 2000 if thats makes ne difference

 

[Lightfytr]

Hey domination, you can go to microsoft.com and click to windows update, download all the updates and it should also download the most current video drivers. after it installs all of that stuff you should click your right mouse button on your desktop and then select properties, from there you can select settings and change the display to 256 or 32 bit or whatever your cpu can handle.

 

[wdavidhicks]

Of course, all of this contingent upon the fact that your modem drivers have been installed.

Video chipsets could have ATI Rage, nVidia, Cirrus Logic, MGA, Matrox, Intel, Trident (old), etc. printed on them.

 

[newnitrofan]

This shouldn't be too hard to figure out provided that your graphics card is just that a card and not integrated. Even if it is integrated you should be ok. Do you have any of the original software that came with the computer this would be very useful right now.

 

[okihost]

I had to do the same thing a few weeks ago when my drive died and I wanted to upgrade to XP, if you have trouble finding out what type of card/chipset you are running you can find something free at downloads.com that will give you the specs you need and from there it is just trying to find the drivers from the companys site or somewhere like driverguide.

 

[mcvickj]

Well if you have DirectX installed on your system just go to RUN and type in dxdiag. Tell it yes, then click on the Display tab.

 

[Domination]

ok heres the directX page for display but doesn't give me the chip type

 

[mcvickj]

Interesting. That must only pull from the device manager. I thought it physically looked at the hardware. Go to

http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

and download the Belarc Advisor. This is a free PC aduit utility. This program should be able to tell you everything you want to know about your PC.

 

[Domination]

ok it says i have a Standard PCI Graphics Adapter (VGA)