Saturday 25 June 2011

The importance of having the right Video driver that matches the Video Card on your PC or laptop

I had a customer call in and report that many of her applications were either not running correctly, were causing hanging, or were simply not running at all, and I know from this lady that she is unlikely to bring in malware (the first possible source of all this trouble), and right enough after checking her system it was clean from any malware..... 
However her problem was that her system had a nice (ok, old now!) Radeon 9800 VGA card, but she was using Windows XP, which is fine, but she installed the card herself, and because it worked out of the box, she didn't bother to load the software supplied with it (the Radeon Catalyst software), as it was fine as it is.!!!..   This is where she got it wrong, as the software that loaded was the Microsoft default driver, which IS good enough to run basic applications, and the net etc.. In fact this driver is really only designed to get the card going so that the correct driver and software can be applied appropriately. Hence when she (or her daughter) tried to run any graphic intensive applications, such as games, graphical design programs etc, the system simply failed becuase of not having the correct drivers. So whenever you have a system with a good Graphical processor (VGA card), even if it's built in (or on board), make sure you have the correct driver installed for that card, IF you want to get the most out of it!. If you're having any trouble doing this why not contact us (XL Computers), as I'm sure we can help in that regard!.. 


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