53.03 w/ GeForce4 440 32MB get white screen . . .

[MSUStevo]

I saw a post on the Compuserve Laptop Forum about updating video drivers, never realized sites like this and Pieter's existed. Can't imagine how much time you put into all this. Thanks much!!!

Seeing Toshiba's official driver 28.XX era, I tried installing the 53.03 driver, substituting Peiter's INF file as instructed. Upon reboot got a white screen and the boot process seems to stop. After going into safe mode, and using Program Uninstall to remove the driver, installed 45.91. All well again, except for one little glitch . . .

While reading through the nView 2.0 User Guide and learning my away around nView, discovered that the icon for the Desktop Manager Control Panel utility not showing up, see the .exe file for it in the directory created after unzipping the download, but no way to get to it from the Control Panel. I did a search for this file, dmcpl.exe, and got two hits. One in the directory created during the unzip and another as part of a .pf file. I tried unistalling 45.91 and reinstalling it, no change. Noticed the .pf file not removed during the uninstall process. Any ideas?

As far as the 52.xx drivers go, any suggestions on how to make them work on my machine, or just sit tight till a mobile version comes out?

I saw the note about changing the softEDID setting for Toshiba users, see in the 11.65 INF a section called Toshiba with this setting already on 0, so I assumed this took care of itself during the driver install.

I read Pieter's sticky post, I am one version removed from the most recent BIOS for my machine and haven't tried updating the chip set drivers for my machine. See what you mean about the Intel site, I never did find anything called chip set drivers, but did find utilities to update my chip set INF files, assume this what you are refering to when you talk about chip set drivers. I can certainly go through the process of installing these updates if you think they might make a difference. See I've gotten a bit spoiled by installation wizards and all, both of these update processes remind me of my earlier days of computing, better make sure I follow the instructions closely.

On a closing note, Pieter you mentioned your site under construction. I found it easy to get around on and really like all the little notes you've made throughout. The installation and nView guides real sharp, first time I could watch a DVD on my TV and not have the right 1/3 of the screen cut off, pretty cool!! Look forward to hearing from you.

Steve Brooks

Lansing, MI

[MSUStevo]

Hello Pieter,

While looking through the Technical section I came across a post from dontknow that mentioned having problems with the control panel not installing. Just like on his machine, when I go to actually install the new drivers I get two display adapter choices: GeGorce4 440 Go and GeForce4 440 Go Toshiba, up to now I've always picked the Toshiba one.

Seeing that dontknow had better success when picking the plain 440 option I have tried uninstalling the 45.91 drivers and reinstalling them doing the same. No change, still no control panel, but I did note when I pick Toshiba the drivers default to Dualview, when I pick plain 440 the default becomes clone view. Hope this helps some.

BTW, does it matter which display adapter I pick? Why does it show two?

Steve Brooks

[®®®]

Why does it show two?  

because of the different device and subsys IDs.

First thing to do (just a suggestion) is to find out your IDs.

sorry going to bed right now and i'm not able to read/understand your whole stuff :shock: right now! Sorry again. The only thing i can say after overflying your text is PLS UNINSTALL ANY OLD DRIVER PROPERLY.

Can't say it often enough.

As i remember in my half-sleep/half-awake state, another german user (schneggenwixer) also has problems with the 5x.xx drivers on his 440GO GPU.

yawn, yawn good night

[ministeve]

After going into safe mode, and using Program Uninstall to remove the driver, installed 45.91. All well again, except for one little glitch . . .

While reading through the nView 2.0 User Guide and learning my away around nView, discovered that the icon for the Desktop Manager Control Panel utility not showing up, see the .exe file for it in the directory created after unzipping the download, but no way to get to it from the Control Panel. I did a search for this file, dmcpl.exe, and got two hits. One in the directory created during the unzip and another as part of a .pf file. I tried unistalling 45.91 and reinstalling it, no change. Noticed the .pf file not removed during the uninstall process. Any ideas?

I had the same problem, all .exe utilities are not installed. Pieter might have a comment to make on this. I think he advises to use this driver as first choice, so he might know it very well.

As far as the 52.xx drivers go, any suggestions on how to make them work on my machine, or just sit tight till a mobile version comes out?

I saw the note about changing the softEDID setting for Toshiba users, see in the 11.65 INF a section called Toshiba with this setting already on 0, so I assumed this took care of itself during the driver install.

Actually there is another section nv_SoftwareDeviceSettings_NV17_Toshiba_BTR80 in which SoftEDIDs is 1, but due to my extreme ignorance I have no idea what the difference is. Again, Pieter might perhaps explain if there is any difference.

I have also been unable to install any 5x.xx properly, though my problem is different from yours (a black vertical band on the right part of the display due to hor. resolution reduced).

Ste

[mobilenvidia]

* Option: SoftEDIDs
*
* Description:
*
* The SoftEDIDs registry key enables dynamic generation of an appropriate
* EDID for mobile LCD displays from data stored in the video BIOS. If this
* is turned off, then on mobile systems, a hardcoded EDID will be chosen
* from a table, based on the value of the Mobile registry key.

* Possible Values:
*
*  0 = disable dynamic EDID generation
*  1 = enable  dynamic EDID generation (default)
*

*
* Option: Mobile
*
* Description:
*
* The Mobile registry key should only be needed on mobile systems if
* SoftEDIDs is disabled (see above), in which case the mobile value
* will be used to lookup the correct EDID for the mobile LCD.
*
* Possible Values:
*
*  ~0 = auto detect the correct value (default)
*   1 = Dell notebooks
*   2 = non-Compal Toshiba
*   3 = all other notebooks
*   4 = Compal/Toshiba
*   5 = Gateway
*
* Make sure to specify the correct value for your notebook.
*

Description from nVidia.

Hope this helps, or are you more baffled now.

Pieter.

[MSUStevo]

Hi Pieter,

Printed out the info. on softEDIDs and the Mobile setting. Assuming you want to experiment and see if changing any of these settings will get 53.03 to work on my machine, have some time tonight, will experiment a bit.

I used the DX Caps Viewer to find out my Device ID 0x00000174 and SubSys ID 0x00011179 which corresponds to NV_17_TS in the INF file. The viewer shows my display driver as GeForce4 440 Go Toshiba, no reference to the GeForce4 440 Go that also shows up when I go to install the driver.

In the event I have to stick with the 45.91 driver what can I do to get the control panel to install properly?

Steve Brooks

[MSUStevo]

Sorry for not using the existing thread for Toshiba users, didn't look down far enough to see it when I first logged on.

Saw the post by Wifigamer, I'm experiencing exactly the same thing he describes in his post, but thought I should make one thing clear in case it didn't jump out the first time.

When using 53.03 w/ the 11.65 INF during boot up the normal Windows XP screen comes up with the moving bar, then the screen goes all white (or sometimes all white then quickly fading to all black) instead of putting up the log in screen, after entering the password blind, boot up continues like normal and the screen comes back to life. I'm not a big gamer so I can't comment on that front, but WinDVD 5 Gold played a DVD just fine and I'm typing this message. So everything seems OK, except for the bootup screen. The Desk Manager Control Panel loads in fine to, unlike w/ 45.91.

I've tried several different combinations of softEDID and Mobile settings, still don't get a log in screen. Perhaps we are barking up the wrong tree. Maybe part of the driver not loading in fully for the log in screen, but finishes loading after logging in? Hence the screen springing back to life within a few seconds of typing in the password. Not sure how this would explain why the problem centers around 4x0 machines. Hope it helps in some small way just the same.

It just occured to me that way back when, while reading the update history for the Toshiba BIOS updates, the last one for my machine, v1.70 (I have 1.6 right now), mentioned it fixed a screen problem during boot up. Hmm. Thinking I need to install that update and see if it helps any, didn't have any floppies handy at the time otherwise I would have done it back when I first got my machine.

Time for bed, will work on this tomorrow after work.

Steve

[mobilenvidia]

Steve,

Try the BIOS update, and see how you go.

I'm not of much use here as I don't have a Toshiba (anymore).

I can only suggest things (so far unsuccessful).

So you are saying the login screen is whited out, and after that it's good.

This might be a low res problem, try going into Commamd prompt and press 'CTRL Enter' this should maximise the screen does it do it here as well ?

Pieter.

[MSUStevo]

Good morning Pieter (morning here at least),

Will work on BIOS update after work, turns out v1.80 the most current now, most recent update revolves around some security fixes.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Login screen on intitial boot up all white, type in password blind, hear boot up continue, music plays, then just at the moment the desktop normally appears the screen instantly goes from all white to my normal desktop. From then on everything like normal, screen saver works, as well as the login screen when coming out of screen saver.

W/ the 45.91 drivers I normally see the mouse pointer appear on a black screen before the login screen comes up. W/ 53.03 I see an all black screen, which then switches to all white when the login screen would normally come up. It doesn't switch to white instantly, at first it's a dark muddy gray, darker around the edges (like someone pushed their palm against the LCD real hard), then rapdily fading to all white.

Went to the command prompt screen, on my machine CTRL Enter didn't do anything, but ALT Enter took me full screen and back again with no problem.

Steve

[mobilenvidia]

Good morning here too now Steve,

Whoops that should have been ALT Enter.

Have you tried anything in 640x480 or lower (ie a game).

I'm just wondering what resolution the login screen is at.

I don't bother with logging in, so I can't compare notes on this.

Pieter

[MSUStevo]

Hey ho Pieter,

No I don't know the resolution of the login screen, but am sure it's much higher than 640x480 based on how the screen looks normally and how it looks when booting with no drivers.

Installed BIOS 1.80, sigh, no change. However, did note I could see the screen prompts just fine, as the process involved using a bootable floppy disk. Occured to me it would have made things very difficult if the screen had goen white during this process, figure nVidia drivers aren't used during this sort of thing.

Wish I knew more about just how video drivers work so I could speak more intelligently, but it seems as I watch things that Windows has it's own drivers that handle things at first, then it hands off at some point to the nVidia drivers. How else can it put up a display when all the drivers are removed? It seems to me something not getting loaded in during this handoff and it's messing up the login screen, but it gets loaded in later allowing the desktop to come up like normal.

As an aside, I never wanted to login in the first place, but I've had to go through the login screen ever since installing NET Framework. It creates a restricted user account for itself, dug through the MS KB to figure out how to get rid of it, evidently vital to the proper opperation of NET Framework so I've left it alone. Since technically I have a two user machine now, XP thinks it needs to offer me a choice when I boot up. Thing is, the NET user so restricted it doesn't show up as a choice, so I get to pick myself from a list of one each time I boot up. The IT guy at work read me the riot act for not using a password on my machine, so I have one now, not sure if it worth all the trouble. Have to type it everytime I come out of screen saver, bad enough before having to click on my lone icon each time.

Enough rambling from me, appreciate you digging into this problem for all of us.

Steve

BTW, assuming this an extended hobby for you, what do you make your living as? Myself, I'm someone who has always had a gift for working on mechanical things, currently I repair lab equipment at a major university. I did a lot of hobby computer stuff in college, I had an Atari ST. My Mega STe 4 still runs great, not that I use it much anymore. Only recently jumped back into the Wintel world when I bought my Toshiba about 2 years ago now. A wonderful machine, but many orders of complexity beyond the older machines. Imagine no one person can keep up with every aspect of it anymore, just look at how much time we are putting into figuring out the intricacies of just one vendors video drivers.

[mobilenvidia]

Steve,

Still try running a windows game in 640x480 and see what happens.

In DOS mode (bootable floppy) the GPU runs in VGA mode (different to windows)

Now you've opened a can of wiggly worms.

I actually work in a Resort Hotel in NZ, Mt Cook National Park to be exact.

I do all the buying for the Hotel, including Computers (no lappies yet).

My hobbies are playing with Graphics drivers, photograpy ( http://www.trekearth.com/ ), I have a plot of land up the road from where I work/live where I hope to grow some grapes and build a house for the family.

A steep learnig curve and hard work, but all worth it.

My first computer, this brings back fond memories.

It was a Commodore Pet, it had a 1Mhz 6502 (as in the Apple I/II).

8K of RAM and 24k of ROM a tape driver build in, and a 10" Black and white monitor also build in.

There wern't any programs for it so I wrote all my progs in assembler (also written by me).

I had 2 years of learning, then indulged in an Amstrad 64, with 64KB RAM and 2.5Mhz Z80 CPU.

After this a whole succesion of Intel/AMD clone computers came my way.

From a 40Mhz 386 to a 800Mhz (OCed 1Ghz) Athlon.

And as of 18mths ago when I got my trusty Gateway with it's 16.20 Detonator and noway of updating the driver.

I started this really thanks to Teraphy, whose Forum (an older version you see today) I got interested in.

Now I spend alot of time here with frowns from my Wife.

Speaking of which ('Yes Dear').

Must go I'm supposed to be packing to go away to the 'Inlaws' for Xmas.

Take care,

Pieter.

[MSUStevo]

Greetings Pieter,

I have exciting news. 53.03 works just fine on my machine now!! Not so exciting news, I'm not sure why.

Over the weekend I updated my touchpad and mouse drivers and experimented with various modifications to the INF file to no avail, ultimately ending up with no video at all. I reinstalled 53.03 using the stock 11.65 INF file, rebooted and went through the normal white screen while logging in. I enabled the Desktop Manager, played with the TV out settings some and went to bed. Next day, turned on my machine and got a normal boot up screen!

While hesitant to do so, seeing everything working fine now. I'm thinking tonight I'll uninstall 53.03, do a driver scrub and reinstall again. Then I'll active the Desktop Manager, reboot . . . until I find which step made everything work properly. Will check in before I start in tonight to see if you have any cautions/suggestions.

Trust you had an enjoyable Christmas with your inlaws, my folks usually have a house full, but everyone had plans or sick this year. So just my parents and myself this time, my dad in a good mood which made things more fun. Some friends got married two days after Christmas and I did sound for the wedding, busy days recently, time to get back to the work routine and rest up! Speaking of which time to hit the road.

Steve

[MSUStevo]

Hi Pieter,

Have made some interesting discoveries.

I removed the 53.03 driver, used Driver Cleaner 2.6 and reinstalled. Got white login screen like usual. As an aside, I've discovered the white screen also appears when I'm in screen saver long enough to bring up the login screen upon coming out of screen saver mode, have to reboot, no way to recover when this happens.

Back to today's news, going into nView shows it's defaulting to single display mode, switching to Dual View seems to get around the bootup problem. I used the TV out as the second display and rebooted, got a normal login screen and watched a DVD on both screens w/ no problem.

Getting the impression the underlying problem deals with some sort of confusion over defining the primary display. Have noticed the folowing inconsistancies:

1) When initially switching to Dual View, my LCD reverted to 800 x 600, had to reset it back to 1600 x 1200. I first tried going back to single view and got the white screen, after 15 sec time out, desktop came back. After getting the resolution set right, and tweaking the TV out adjustments, I rebooted.

2) I tried again to switch to single display mode and back to Dual View. No go, made the TV my single display, after some fiddling got the desktop back onto the LCD screen. Further attempts to switch back and forth resulted in nVidia error 102. Noticed it cycled through the default 800 x 600 desktop and the infamous white screen as it tried to switch modes.

3) Picking the analog display as the second display results in a mixup, my LCD becomes the second display, had to reboot as I couldn't access the start menu or taskbar (I didn't have an external monitor hooked up).

Let me know what more I can do to help sort this out.

Steve

[mobilenvidia]

Steve,

There is very little I can suggest, I had a hell of a time getting my LCD to go back to Display 1 when trying to solve a TV-out problem.

The drivers work funny on certain Toshinbas, I can't figure it out.

You might just have to put up with the white log-in screen, a little inconvieniance but at least it works.

I think with TweakXP you can setup WinXP to autologin upon bootup.

My Lappy only needs the login (click on user) after Hibernation.

The Detonators work oddly, with the very early 44.xx drivers I could only get them to work with D3D in Clone mode.

Where as others with same GPU didn't have this problem.

Keep playing around,

Pieter.

[MSUStevo]

Good Morning Pieter,

Looks like the big news got lost in all the detail.

I don't have a white login screen anymore. Setting nView to Dual View has corrected that problem. For all practical purposes my machine now running perfectly normally w/ 53.03 and 11.65 INF as long as I don't try to switch display modes.

I added the other detail to show I don't think single display mode vs. Dual View mode the actual problem, but switching to Dual View makes up for some underlying problem with how the drivers are defining the various video devices. Hence the problems when I try to switch between display modes. Almost as if they are getting the primary and secondary displays mixed up at some times, but not others.

Several messages back you sent me a portion of a list defining the different settings in the INF driver. To aid in my experimenting, would you kindly point me towards a source where I can get a complete copy of that list?

Thanks much

Steve

[mobilenvidia]

Steve,

Is this what your after : http://download.nvidia.com/freebsd/1.0-4365/README.txt

It's a TXT file for FreeBSD, might be of some help.

This is where I got the info from ealier in the thread.

Is Dualview slowing down the laptop any ?

Pieter.

[MSUStevo]

Hey ho Pieter,

I ran Passmark Performance Test 4.0, discovered I have a problem w/ 3D graphics. Simple and Medium test run 2 to 3 times faster than when I first bought my machine, but the full screen complex test won't run. Ran dxdiag and found the Direct 3D 7,8 9 routnines won't run on Display 1, but the DX 9 routines will run on Display 2 (my TV). Hmmm. Two of the 2D tests virtually the same, the rectangle test about 20% of my original speed.

Still supicious of how my machine handling various video devices. During the Passmark 3D test could see flikers of the 800 x 600 desktop comming through and during its attempt to do the full screen test parts of my desktop spilled over onto my TV.

Will check out the link you sent me and see if I have any brainstorms.

Steve

[mobilenvidia]

Steve,

You seem to have the reverse of what I had with the early 44.xx drivers, I couldn't get them to work in D3D, unless I was in clone mode but with a 10% performance drop.

Mmmm, odd.

Pieter

[MSUStevo]

Hello Pieter,

I'm making some progress, Passmark and dxdiag work fine now while in Dual View mode. Speeds significantly better to slightly worse than when my machine new. I removed most of the lines in the INF file that don't show up in the "official" Toshiba INF file that came with 28.46.

Still working on the white screen problem, definitely related to how the driver defines display devices. Digital Display TV and Digital Display Analog Display work fine, can switch back and forth with no problems, but Digital Display by itself brings up a white screen. Going to dig out my CRT and see if it goes active when I get the white screen.

Reinstalled 45.91 and noted that it doesn't offer a Single Display mode, just Dual View with only one display active. So it makes sense that everything works fine once I switch to Dual View mode in 53.03. Still hoping to figure out how to get rid of the white screen so folks can boot up like normal after a new install or if they try the Single Display mode. Found an interesting entry in the registry called NvCplInitialPrimaryDevice.

Reaching the limits of my knowledge of how to get around in the registry. Oodles of CSLID's (hope I got that right, the files in brackets with the huge names) under video, seems one for each install I've tried. How to figure out which one the currently active one without having to inspect each one?

Steve

[mobilenvidia]

Steve,

Welcome to the world of Registry tweaking.

It can be a jungle out there (the registry) especially when trying to find the current settings.

It's odd you can only get Dualview with one display, Dualview is Single Display with the 2nd Display enabled (how it's supposed to work).

The white screen is a Toshiba only prob, so I'm not much use here.

Pieter.

[MSUStevo]

Hey ho Pieter,

Looking at how many files you have generated I sit in amazement. I've only fussed with my one machine over the past few weekends and am pretty much worn out. Suppose not so much I'm tired of it, I love solving problems, but am frustrated with the lack of available info. as to what all the different flags and settings actually do. Thanks for the link to the nVidia info., they actually have a much newer one now that has a lot more info. in it. Unfortuantely, all geared towards Linux, perhaps it will make more sense to you than it did me.

At this point I have a GeForce 4 440 Go Toshiba running without problem using 53.03 and a heavily modified 11.65 INF file. All the dxdiag tests run perfectly on the LCD and TV displays, the Passmark graphics tests all run to. Graphics performance faster, except for 2D rectangles in Dual View mode which are 80% slower for some inexplicable reason.

I have struck out on the white screen problem, can't use single display mode, no big deal really as the the Dual View modes work just fine. When rebooting after first installing the driver from a clean install you have to log in blind and then hold down Fn and hit F5 two times to get to LCD analog mode, or four times to get to LCD TV mode. Once things are setup in the control panel the machine reboots from that point on just like normal. Full screen video on the TV out works super with DVD's.

Happy to post the INF file if you have an interest in seeing it. I disabled almost all the tweaks, deleted the whole DCBOverride/NV_Mode section, substituting the original Toshiba one, restored the orginal Toshiba settings and put back in some lines from the original Toshiba INF. A brute force approach, but in the end it fixed the Direct X problems, corrected the goofy TV out resolutions and restored stability to the whole process of switching display modes.

If I knew more about how the registry works, suspect I could get to the bottom of the white screen problem, guessing it has to do with the default monitor configuration. In the device manager I show three monitors: default, default and plug in play. Wonder if on initial boot up and for single diplay mode it goes for the plug and play instead of the LCD.

With all the time in front of the computer I've let other things go, so I need to take a break from video driver editing. Seeing I have one of the "odd" machines I'm more than willing to act as a test bed for any new INF's you come up with. I'm not a big gamer, so maybe this limits my usefulness to you, but I do use my machine everyday mostly for movies, e-mail and surfing the net. Much like you, this whole adventure of updating video drivers had a humble beginning in trying to get my DVD software to play a DVD with a strange copy protection scheme. Yes I finally got to watch it, pretty good movie as it turned out.

While reading other posts on this forum I noticed some folks concerned that you and Terephy are running the risk of getting overloaded. Indeed I've noticed on the Compuserve Laptop forum, previously the Toshiba Laptop forum, there are tons of people looking for newer drivers, many of the posts go unanswered. How do you see yourself fitting into all of this? Do you want more people to come directly to your site, like I did, or are you looking for folks who would act as a bridge of sorts? Providing links to your "everyday" driver/INF combinations and fielding basic questions "out in the trenches" to relieve you from some of that burden.

Thanks for taking the time to respond to my posts despite my newbee status, cool to see the web working in a good way, bridging space and time in a way no other medium could. Working at a university you might guess we have folks from all over the world in our building, I met someone from New Zealand a couple weeks ago, have to track them down and see if they have ever gone to the park you work at. We've had several people from Australia come through over the years to. Those of us that work in the basement level of our building keep a big map on the wall with little flags to show everyone's home, some countires are getting pretty crowded!

Getting late, I'll keep checking in to see "what's cooking".

Steve Brooks

Michigan, US

[mobilenvidia]

Steve,

Are you by any chance a novilist ?

The 3 monitors you see in display properties are:

'Plug and play' is the LCD panel, can also be set to a specific device.

The other 2 Default monitors are TV-out and Monitor out.

Attach your INF, it ,might just help others with the same problem.

As for overloading, it's been solved now, I no longer deal with Emails to do with problems (a big mistake, one day I got 70).

I just stick with this forum, I keep an eye on some others.

So send the Toshiba users over here for drivers and questions.

The more people playing with them the better, and also more likely to solve any probs.

I'm certainly not the know all of INFs, I've learned everything in the last 6 months, and the learning curve is still steep.

I'm not too keen on making the INFs too complicated, it's too easy to make mistakes (on my part) and updating becomes very hard especially over quite a few INFs.

I also must visit your part of the country, I hear there are a couple of nice wee lakes around there.

Have a nice break away from this.

Pieter.

[®®®]

Oodles of CSLID's (hope I got that right, the files in brackets with the huge names) under video, seems one for each install I've tried. How to figure out which one the currently active one without having to inspect each one?  

Crosscheck which one of the CLSIDs is currently installed (look under HKLMSYSTEMCCSENUMPCIVENxxxxxxxxxxxx

You said you used DXCaps to find out your device id. Find the Matching One in the PCIVENxxxxxxxxxxxx folders. Then click on the subfolder and find the entry "driver" which describes which driver under which class id is used NOW. If you had some unsuccesful installs before, it is likely that the number behind the class id is like the following:

"xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx005"

After that, search the class id (xxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxx bla) and delete all non-used driver subfolder.