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Windows Vista and a Geforce FX 5650


Guest elton

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Hi there,

I've recently installed a vlite'd Windows Vista Ultimate onto my Inspiron 8500 laptop. So far the results I've observed have puzzled me. First of all, the specification:

Pentium 4 Mobile, 2.5GHz

1GB RAM at 266MHz

Geforce FX 5650 with 128MB RAM

60GB disk

After installing Windows Vista, I popped Dreamscene onto it as well. The video background absolutely crawls, stuttering every fraction of a second, the CPU (not GPU) hits 100% and stays there, and everything takes forever. Since I was under the impression that a) a Geforce FX card would be able to decode an HD WMV file without much problem, and :) Dreamscene utilised the GPU instead of the CPU, I'm puzzled as to why not only does the video crawl, but the CPU seems to be used? Explorer.exe is the process using the CPU, not the Desktop Window Manager. As soon as Dreamscene is stopped, the CPU returns to 5-10%.

I've tinkered with many different drivers, from the Windows WDDM one supplied with Vista, to the one from nvidia's site (which doesn't even allow Aero), to ones from this website (although I found it difficult to pick just one from the one billion variations available. What is it now, version 160?)

Can anyone enlighten me as to what's going on?

P.S. My aunt has just purchased an Inspiron 6400 with an integrated Intel 950 graphics processor. It handles Aero and Dreamscene without any rise whatsoever in central processing. If an integrated Intel GPU can handle it, surely a slightly older but dedicated card should do it?

Thanks in advance.

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  • 1 month later...

I don't know if this applies but I think over in the dell forum they mention that pentium M CPU is not supported by vista. What I'm trying to say is that "speedstep" is not supported. There are a couple of "fixes" that are mentioned in the dell forum that will allow the CPU to be at reasonable speeds. Hope that helps.

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Vista handles mobile CPUs just fine, including SpeedStep.

I think this is an Overlay vs. VMR problem. The FX series doens't have advanced video capability, so when VMR (Video Machine Rendering) is enabled, it relies on the CPU for video processing. The solution is to turn off VMR and use Hardware Overlay instead. If VMR is an option in your driver control panel, disable it. If Dreamscene has any video options, make sure you enable Overlay, and try enabling Overlay in Windows Media Player, in case DreamScene is picking up its video settings from there.

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  • 1 month later...

Hello All

I'm exactly in the same boat as "Guest_Elton".

I've been trying to upgrade my video driver, but unlucky: after installing, the driver crashes and I get a Microsoft default one which does not even support my resolution.

So right now I'm stuck with the nvlddmkm driver which makes my machine deadly slow (unusable).

With this driver, is it possible to do what you (LSudlow) suggested, change the VMR option ? Did not find where to do that.

If someone has information about how to install a driver on my machine I'm interested. I've tried several, including 169.09 and 167.26. I did not modify any inf file since I did not understand how to do this (and don't know what I would do).

I've searched the forum for people with the same card but it seems nobody had it work correctly on Vista ???

My machine is a Dell Inspiron 8600 with a Pentium M and a Geforce FX 5650 with 128MB RAM.

The system is Vista.

I've read the FAQs and tested various downloads but no success.

I'm a beginner so sorry if I missed something obvious.

Thanks

Voltan

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