Customizing Laptop specific INFs - How To?

[Birdie]

Is there a guide somewhere in the forums to writing your own infs. I've found that the most stable are provided by the manufacturer but there is higher performance from the newer drivers. Rather than waiting for the manufacturer to release another driver I'd rather write my own inf. I was hoping that there was a breakdown of the midified inf layout somewhere so that I could know what was specific to my machine and what I could leave out. Some information like this may lead to lots of people writing their own infs and then we could have machine specific infs, hopefully increasing stability.

[envydyauser]

I've found that the most stable are provided by the manufacturer but there is higher performance from the newer drivers. ... know what was specific to my machine and what I could leave out.

Hitting the nail on the head, as they say.

I came to the same conclusion a couple of months back, so I collated my manufacturer's 84.68 inf with this site's 163.16 inf, and used it to install Nvidia's 162.18 Forceware.

Took 2/3 hours of fastidious, line-by-line comparing/collating/merging, but it was well worth it.

Tip : do a Word or Wordpad file with lines from each source inf in different colours, so you can easily add new lines from newer drivers as they appear, without getting confused. You can then save as .txt or inf whenever you want to reinstall.

Of course a single database detailing what each registry key does, and what settings are valid, is sorely lacking.

cheers

envydyauser

[Birdie]

How did you know which lines were specific to your system and which weren't?

Did you mainly work from the manufacturers inf adding lines from the newer one or did you do it the othewr way round? (Or neither I guess!!!)

Were there inf sections that you maintained specfically for the newer files or for the system?

Sorry that's a lot of questions.

[envydyauser]

> How did you know which lines were specific to your system and which weren't?

>

First thing is to identify your card model down to the SUBSYS level, I use MS devcon.exe, but you can see it in the Windows Ctrl Panel / Device Manager.

Then you look for your card at the bottom of the inf file. Let' say Go 7300 : you'll get the device ID (1D7).

Go to the top of inf and find the line(s) with this device ID. If there are more than one, pick the one with your card's SUBSYS number. Then you'll know what sections to look for in the rest of the inf.

In a word :

; Localizable Strings

NVIDIA_G72.DEV_01D7.1 = "NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300"

[NVIDIA.Mfg]

%NVIDIA_G72.DEV_01D7.1% = nv4_SanAntonio, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_01D7&SUBSYS_FF101179

The sections containing "nv4_SanAntonio" are the ones with my card's settings.

Think in terms of sections rather than lines, at first : yhen you can delete all non-relevant sections (I did) and the inf will be much more readable.

> Did you mainly work from the manufacturers inf adding lines from the newer one or did you do it the othewr way round? (Or neither I guess!!!)

>

I chose to use my manufacturer's settings as reference. You may choose differently obviously.

> Were there inf sections that you maintained specfically for the newer files or for the system?

>

the hardest part is collating the (very numerous) lines of tweaks from the modded inf. There are many doubles, beware, even in the modded inf itself, as well as spelling errors & the like.

I heavily used cmd-line stuff like grep and cut to quickly sort through the dozens of lines of settings. Notepad isn't very useful in this respect.

I'm attaching here my inf for reference if you like : I commented it at every step.

good editing ;-)

nviv_REFERENCE_8468_16218.inf