Any Windows experts out there?

I have an Nvidia Geoforce 4 card, Windows XP, and have suffered a Windows disaster (how unusual!). The problem is that I restored windows, installed my graphics drivers again, went to log into Second Life, and was told that I only had a PCI card. I had a look at the drivers under Device Manager, and indeed, it is giving the location of my graphics card as a PCI slot rather than an AGP one.

This will affect the performance, and I have no idea how to set things right again. I've tried deleting and reinstalling the driver, have downloaded the latest driver from the Nvidia site, and nothing I have tried has made any difference.

Is this a problem that's familiar to anyone, and if so do you have any idea how I can fix it?

I'll be grateful for any useful suggestions.

thats an extremely bizarre problem....

sounds like the correct video driver is not being loaded.

Do you have all of the correct color depth/ resolutions avaliable in your display/control panel dialog?

That is often a symptom......

Try this: Go to your system devices dialog. Uninstall your video card.

Install the generic vesa video driver (pci something or other).

Reboot

Now install the geforce driver, using the utility from nvidia's website.

Sometimes that workes, anyways. I don't remember the URL, but there are also driver 'cleaners' that will remove all traces of your old drivers. It is possible to do it manually, but I wouldn't suggest it for the faint of heart.

If you can get your hands on another video card, just swap them out, change the drivers, reboot once, and swap them back--->That should work too

Bit

Sounds like it might be time to reformat and reinstall the OS from scratch.

it's actually your bios. get the very latest bios from the manufactuer of your mother board. sl has a link to a couple of them let's see where is that oh yea

http://secondlife.com/download/utilities.php

The only problem with this is that it worked before windows had to be reinstalled. A windows reinstallation shouldn't requires a BIOS upgrade that I would know of.

I think they are correct , might have to reinstall the driver or possibly the entire OS to get this problem resolved. I too have a Geforce 4 card and Windows XP and this happened once to me as well. I just reinstalled the OS but there may be a better way to do it such as how Bit Phaeton suggests.

**HM** Thinking about the BIOS .. You might make sure the BIOS settings haven't changed for some odd reason.

yeah dan... if the bios settings got reset to defaults that could enable on board pci video on some pc's.

theres another bios setting called Primary Video or something like that, it might have been reset to PCI but that shouldnt matter unless you have two video cards... Safer to set it to AGP.

You also may want to look for chipset drivers for your motherboard. For example, some of our machines here at Linden require Intel chipset drivers installed before they will turn AGP on. You may want to poke around your motherboard manufacturer's website and look for Windows chipset drivers for it.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I have checked the BIOS, and that's ok. It is a fresh install of Windows, and I did try to manually get rid of all the NVidia drivers at one point.

The last suggestion is interesting, because on the SL entry site it did mention chipset drivers. The problem is, I don't even know what chipset drivers are. I suppose this means yet another steep learning curve.

Anyway, thanks everybody.

Modern motherboards have hardware on them (referred to as a chipset) that your operating system needs to talk to in order to get the best performance. The chipset drivers are the software that allows your operating system to do that.

They are unfortunately difficult to find sometimes; your best bet is to reboot and watch the BIOS startup screen, write down all of the serial numbers and names that show up, and then google for them; you'll probably get lucky, especially if you have a newer PC.

Ok
1. The BOIS didn't change unless you changed them or you shorted the battery on purpose
2. Your AGP drivers are not loading, IE chipset.
3. Your Vid drivers are loading, if you have a rez of like 320 *120 then you vid drivers are not loading.
4. Last and most important... don't use the Windows restore points.. they suck!

If you can give us more information on your motherboard, i'll find the chipset drivers for it

Thanks!

It's an MSI 875P Neo series motherboard, running a P4 processor.

You will want the Canterwood chipset drivers at this URL:

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/support/driver/dvr/spt_dvr_list.php

or intel's site :

http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/Product_Filter.asp?ProductID=1043

You are welcome. Please drive thru.

Your problem could easily be solved by installing linux
Oh wait we dont have a linux client yet. And its probably not even planned either
So... Get a MAC!

Eggy,

I got so fed up with Windows that I actually bought Suse Linux, with the intention of installing it on my other hard drive.

I have a couple of RAID arrays, and that caused major problems for SUSE, who kept informing me during installation that I was lacking any hard drives. There was a method of getting it to recognise RAID arrays, but it was so complicated I didn't even attempt it. Eventually, out of desperation, I reduced one of the arrays to a single hard drive. I started to reinstall SUSE, and lo and behold, it told me I had no hard drives.

I love computers!

Take out the video card from ur Mobo, run the computer. Then shut down, plug the video card back in and start it up again, this time make sure to check for the AGP slot when the BIOS startup (usually the stats table) use the "Pause" key to make sure u don'y miss it.

What exact brand name video card you have, casue Nvidia is features on many brand name cards. Unless urs is pure orginal. Find out what ever company made the video card, and check out the drivers on their site. If you don't have the box or know exactly it then open ur case and read the card. Most brand names are on their unless it is a no-name chip from some doller store.

If you can post more info about ur card, etc, other than u already posted it would help me to understand the full problem.

That's a rather impressive series of bad ideas. At best, unplugging and re-plugging the video card will confuse Windows and the BIOS. nVidia-based video cards are usually close enough to the reference design that the official drivers will work fine -- and the brand-specific drivers may be worse than the nVidia ones. For example, the most recent drivers put out by the manufacturer of my card are based on the nVidia 28.whatever drivers, while the official nVidia drivers are at version 53.something.

As stated above, the problem is not with the BIOS -- re-installing Windows doesn't affect the BIOS at all. Most likely, it's a lack of drivers for the motherboard. The best fix is to install the motherboard drivers, then re-install either the version 51 or 53 nVidia drivers.

Thanks to everybody for the suggestions.

I downloaded and installed the chipset drivers, and now SL recognises my card as being in an AGP slot. It's interesting though that when I access Device Manager, it still has the card listed as PCI. Still, so long as it works ok ...