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Old July 6th 10, 11:02 AM posted to alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia
zulu[_2_]
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Posts: 2
Default Is my GeForce 7300LE sick?


"Paul" wrote in message
...
zulu wrote:
The symptoms....

When I right click the Desktop and select *Properties* I get no tabs at
all, just the *Themes*

Scrolling, vertically _and_ horizontally is not smooth, but rather in
jumps, with the screen
refreshing to the new position, a bit up or down (or left or right) of
the previous screen. It
looks like waves moving until it settles down again (hard to describe).

The theme is set to 1280x768 to suit the widescreen TV I use for a
monitor (26 inch Samsung),
but the picture is now stretched horizontally, so it looks like 4:3 on a
6x9 widescreen.

Movies are jerky, looks like low frame rate.

Despite uninstalling and reinstalling the card, and (re) updating the
drivers, Device
manager shows an exclamation mark to indicate a problem.

Computer is a 4 year old Dell Desktop, an XPS9150 running Windows XP
Professional
Service Pack 2 (SP3 will not install, but that's another problem...)

Processor is 3.20 gigahertz Intel Pentium D 16 kilobyte primary memory
cache 2048 kilobyte
secondary memory cache 64-bit ready Multi-core (2 total) Not
hyper-threaded.

My feeling is that the 7300LE card is defunct, but how cam I be _sure_
before I rush out to
buy a new one?

TIA

Rog


Is your System Restore function working ? Can you return the OS to a
previous
time point, where the display subsystem is working ?

I've had a problem similar to yours, and in my case, all video
acceleration
features on my old ATI card, ceased to function. If caused painfully slow
updates
to things like video playback, graphics and the like. And if you dragged a
window,
it would repaint over and over again, a frame at a time. I used System
Restore,
to return to an earlier point in time, where my display driver was still
working.

Before using System Restore, you should be aware of how it works. It
should
really only be enabled on the C: partition. It doesn't snapshot things
in the "My Documents" hierarchy, so in theory, won't delete any user data
files in "My Documents". If you created a separate directory somewhere on
C:,
outside of My Documents, System Restore could track those changes. Then,
using a restore point, would result in user data being removed. You can
undo a restore point, at least under some conditions. (It could be, if
you use System Restore in Safe Mode, you might not be able to undo it
again.
To get the full feature set, you should use it in Normal Mode.)
If there is a danger of user data being removed, you should transfer
the user data to a backup disk first, before using System Restore. If
all your data is in the My Documents structure, then you shouldn't have to
worry about it.

So there are some caveats about System Restore. It isn't an "all purpose
hammer", but should be used with discretion. If you had only made one
driver
change, there is a "rollback" option in Device Manager, but you can only
roll back the driver one level. Once a person has been doing a lot of
experimenting, generally by that time, the rollback option isn't of much
value.

This is also a good time, to point out the value of backups, including
your entire C:. I don't do this religiously, but I have a few images
I've collected of my C:, and I'd probably lose a month's worth of changes,
if I had to use one of my backups. I make backups, but not that regularly.
Still, any backup, is better than nothing. Especially if you manage
to get acceleration working on your video card again.

In my case, the acceleration slider was in the "full" position, and
yet acceleration wasn't working. There is an example of that slider, here.

http://www.visualwin.com/DirectX/tro...ation-full.png



Hi Paul...
I stupidly forgot to include the important fact that the problem started
with my _attempt_ to restore the computer from *Dell as shipped condition*
using the copy sic of XP supplied with the computer. I had to (twice)
abort this as it kept telling me it couldn't find files.
It did, however wipe all the Winnows Restore Points.

I need to install XP afresh but only have the Dell disc...

Help!


Now what???