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GeForce4 4200 Go on Dell Inspiron 8500


Guest Mecandes

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Guest Mecandes

Anyone else got a Dell Inspiron 8500 with the nVidia GeForce4 4200 Go ...?

What are the latest best recommended ForceWare drivers for this notebook?

I've been trying to run Dungeon Siege II, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (using Oldblivion), and Star Wars: Empire at War on this laptop, but find that the textures always look extremely low-res no matter what settings I try...

I see the latest recommended drivers for "most laptops" is 84.25 -- is this still true, and in particular, is it true for the Dell Inspiron8500 and GeForce 4 4200 Go?

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Guest Mecandes

Yeah, upgrading from a 60 series driver to the 84.25 driver recommended on this site seems to have decreased performance in these games significantly... without fixing the low-res texture problem at all. Alas.

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With a GF4, maybe you better go with 70 series; 71.89 or 77.77 for example.

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I've been trying to run Dungeon Siege II, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (using Oldblivion), and Star Wars: Empire at War on this laptop, but find that the textures always look extremely low-res no matter what settings I try...

You have to understand that your graphic card is REALLY OLD and you are trying to run Oblivion on it. Running Oblivion of a GF4 4200 requires to dump a lot of stuff.

My desktop computer has a Athlon 64 X2 4400 + 3Gb + GF 7600 GT and I still tone down the graphic settings.

Given your old hardware the latest drivers won't bring you anything but issues fixing. You'd rather stay with the latest Dell official driver for your PC. Mainly because with 84.25 + INF from here disables energy saving features.

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  • 1 year later...
You'd rather stay with the latest Dell official driver for your PC. Mainly because with 84.25 + INF from here disables energy saving features.
I have this same setup - Dell Inspiron 8500 with the nVidia Geforce4 4200 Go. I recently upgraded the video card from an ATI Radeon 9000 with 32MB to double the video memory. And I'd get application lag and crashes with the ATI driver sometimes.

The Geforce 4200 seemed to be running fine with Dell's default driver. But every once in a while, I'll get video corruption, lines, flickering or skewed pixels and the display will either go blank or shut down. Doesn't appear to be overheating - I've run utilities to check that and thoroughly cleaned the dust out of the machine when I installed the card. I'm thinking it's probably the driver - I've seen at least another poster mention that. So I'm wondering what the latest recommendation is for this combo - is it the 84.25, or would the 71.89 or 77.77 be better, as suggested above (and if so, which one)?

I know it's an old machine and card, but it works fine (at least as a spare) apart from this. I'd rather not downgrade to the ATI card again.

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Hi, I am running the same machine and the only way to survive a the moment is not to shut down. Every restart cause a blue screen. "page fault in nonpaged area".

The error is definitely the gf4 4200 go card. This started about a year ago and no end of rebuilds and drivers have been tried to no avail!!

HELP

Driver advice or settings or anything else?

Thanks

Hi, I am running the same machine and the only way to survive a the moment is not to shut down. Every restart cause a blue screen. "page fault in nonpaged area".

The error is definitely the gf4 4200 go card. This started about a year ago and no end of rebuilds and drivers have been tried to no avail!!

HELP

Driver advice or settings or anything else?

Thanks

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