Windows 10 Pro upgrade worked, BUT display issues now...

[Thomas Bradley]

I have a Dell Inspiron E1705 (yes I know it's old...) with the 2.16GHz Core2Duo CPU, optional WUXGA "Ultra-Sharp" 1920x1200 17" screen and nVidia Go 7900 GS video card, Bluetooth, A/B/G WiFi option, HD Audio with subwoofer, 2x2GB dual-channel RAM, and I forget the rest...
About 2 years ago I bought Windows 7 Pro x64 and a new 500GB 7200rpm laptop drive and did a clean Windows install on this laptop with no issues and all hardware was fully supported including the Go 7900 GS, bluetooth, etc.
This laptop actually ran smoother and faster on 7 Pro x64 than it ever did on XP and even supported VM's just fine too (although VM's ran a bit slow)!

Knowing this is old hardware but seeing how well it handled Windows 7 x64 overall I decided to try the Windows 10 Upgrade option to that Windows 7 install and here's what happened...

It rebooted a couple of times and successfully installed pretty much on its' own with almost no user intervention.
It seems to have found my Windows 7 license key and did whatever was necessary to successfully activate Windows 10 automatically, yay!
It put me at a desktop in some tiny resolution with the zoom set really high which took some time to mostly resolve up to a usable level.
All my data and apps are still there and seem to work properly.
I have IE11, Chrome, and that new "Edge" browser and they all seem to work so far.

Apparently "GeForce 8 Series" gets Windows 10 support from both Microsoft and nVidia but the GeForce 7 Series and 7Go Series do not...
That leaves this system stuck with a generic microsoft display driver and generic monitor driver and nothing else I've tried has worked so far.
As a result I'm stuck with 64Hz refresh rate and nothing but 4:3 screen resolutions although I did eventually get it to offer me 1600x1200 on my 1920x1200 screen.

I have been browsing the web, checking emails, running benchmarks, watching the occasional youtube video, and listening to my itunes library with no issues so far and usability is surprisingly decent for its' age. Admittedly youtube doesn't do well on full screen above 480 settings thanks to being stuck on those generic display and monitor drivers...

This laptop still does my fairly hardcore multi-track audio editing just fine and up until this end of support issue for the video card I also used to be able to play steam games just fine on this laptop in basic performance modes...

I haven't gotten far enough into things yet to determine which direct x version it is currently using or what versions I might be able to step it up to yet but I'll post more when I get to that stage of this experiment...

As far as my frustrating 4:3 display issue I've tried the "allow unsupported modes" check box already which gives no additional choices.
The 64Hz choice is the only choice shown in the drop-down list.
I assume the monitor (screen) capabilities are being ignored or overlooked because of the microsoft display adapter driver?

Has anyone else managed to, or does anyone know a way to get the microsoft display driver to offer 60hz and/or widescreen resolutions?

UPDATE!!!

I got it to work!!!
See this post for details:

http://forums.windowscentral.com/as...mpatibility-what-should-i-do.html#post3187811

 

[zack251]

Are you sure the GeForce 7 series is not supported? I have GeForce GTX 770 and is supported. I ran into the problem of Windows did not recognize my graphic card initially. But I solved it by removing old graphic card drivers, using this utility - Display Driver Uninstaller Download version 15.3.1.0

You can read more about the thread here.

Can't get NVIDIA drivers on Windows 10 [Solved] - windows 10 - Windows 10

 

[Thomas Bradley]

Hey Zack,
Thanks for the reply and the suggestions but yes I'm 99.999% sure about the driver issues I'm faced with at this point because your GTX 770 (which I suspect is probably in the ballpark of about 1-3 years old at the most) is not what nVidia refers to as a "7 series" card and the nVidia website doesn't auto-detect my hardware or find anything newer than Windows 7 drivers when I use the search function although it does list Windows 8 in the search criteria with no results found.
As a reference, GeForce "7 series" refers to an older series of cards from roughly 2006 - 2008 that included numerous sub models along with some of AGP and PCI-e variants (AGP went up to but ended at the GeForce 76xx models as I recall) which all have 4-digit model numbers, not a 3-digit one like yours.

 

[mj0]

Have you tried the "update driver automatically" option in device manager? Maybe there's a generic Nvidia driver made by Microsoft available online in their driver database.

 

[zack251]

Yup, you are correct. I just check Nvidia's website and 7 series is different than mine. Worse the website does not list driver for Windows 10.
Perhaps your other option is to upgrade to a newer model. Sorry about that.
Opps, read your post again and you are using a laptop. So maybe impossible to change graphic card.

Hey Zack,
Thanks for the reply and the suggestions but yes I'm 99.999% sure about the driver issues I'm faced with at this point because your GTX 770 (which I suspect is probably in the ballpark of about 1-3 years old at the most) is not what nVidia refers to as a "7 series" card and the nVidia website doesn't auto-detect my hardware or find anything newer than Windows 7 drivers when I use the search function although it does list Windows 8 in the search criteria with no results found.
As a reference, GeForce "7 series" refers to an older series of cards from roughly 2006 - 2008 that included numerous sub models along with some of AGP and PCI-e variants (AGP went up to but ended at the GeForce 76xx models as I recall) which all have 4-digit model numbers, not a 3-digit one like yours.

 

[Thomas Bradley]

Have you tried the "update driver automatically" option in device manager?

Yes, it says I already have the most current driver for my hardware.

Maybe there's a generic Nvidia driver made by Microsoft available online in their driver database.

That's what I'm hoping for although they have not done it so far. Time will tell...

 

[mj0]

In that case you're probably screwed, most likely there will never be a driver for your GPU for Windows 10 since it seems it's been EOL'd by Nvidia.

 

[Thomas Bradley]

Have you tried the "update driver automatically" option in device manager? Maybe there's a generic Nvidia driver made by Microsoft available online in their driver database.

Yes, tried all that, it was no help. Windows 10 installed a generic "microsoft basic display adapter" driver during the upgrade which at least gave me a functional Windows 10 installation on this older hardware although it had the desktop locked at a maximum of around 1024x768 with >250% zoom which was pretty much useless as it made all the icons and text sizes so huge the OK, Cancel, Apply, etc buttons were off the screen and inaccessible until I screwed with window sizes and drug stuff around enough to finally navigate to the necessary sliders and buttons and get it to let me zoom out and then become able to choose something better than 1024x768 on my 1920x1200 capable screen.

I'm not looking for them to bother trying to create some kind of hardcore performance gaming driver for this old card, I'm just really hoping that either microsoft or nvidia will decide to offer a basic generic driver that at a minimum will ideally at least allow the GPU of these old cards to be fully and properly recognized so that the driver can grab the EDID from a laptop's built-in pnp display and pass all the monitor's capability info to the OS which would allow users to access true 16:9 wide-screen settings and enable their display's native resolution, or instead at the least have a microsoft generic driver that would enable some of the standard wide-screen resolutions, especially on the generic microsoft "basic display adapter" driver which you would think would have options for more than the decades old basic 4:3 mode displays which have been pretty much obsolete for a loooong time now but presently it does not...
Fingers crossed that they realize these issues and are willing to change the existing drivers for us at all, hopefully soon...

 

[BigTed]

309.08 drivers are windows 8.1 x64 compliant. Those should work for your series 7 card in windows 10.

 

[Thomas Bradley]

Hey Ted, thanks for the info but have you used that driver with the Go version of the 7 series cards on a laptop in Windows 10 or the desktop version?
If you got it to work on a laptop, which Go 7xxx-xxx card do you have?
The 30x.x series drivers are intended for the regular 7 Series (desktop) cards and apparently do not work on the "Go" 7 Series (laptop) cards (especially in Windows 10), or at least the versions I've tried including that one do launch but when I click "next" they all run for a few seconds and then pop up a box or display a message in the status pane of the installer telling me some equivalent of "no compatible hardware found" and the only choice they give me at that point is "finish".
The Go version laptop cards apparently use driver series 10x.x through 14x.x (instead of the 3xx.x series desktop driver sets) which actually detects the gpu and does go through all the motions as if it's installing in Windows 10 and even prompts for a restart after clicking finish but then the driver does not appear in device manager after restart and the install appears to have no effect on the OS that I can see, regardless of whether I just run it or if I try using the compatibility troubleshooter to run it. No nvidia icon, no nvidia display control panel, no nvidia program group, just the same old "microsoft basic display adapter" driver in device manager, same as before...

If anyone has gotten any particular version of the 30x.x series drivers to install (and actually show up in device manager afterwards) for a laptop's "Go 7 Series" in Windows 10, please tell me which version it is...

 

[sschevy010]

Try using Windows 8 drivers.. Not 8.1.. Just 8.. I had issues trying to get pci sound drivers that w10 update doesn't provide and w8 was only one that works

 

[Thomas Bradley]

Tried that strategy already, here's how it went... (Note that "7 series" does not refer to the current 700 series cards, it means the old 7000 series cards.)
On the nVidia website drivers search area Windows 8.1 doesn't appear in the OS list for these cards at all, Windows 8 ("just 8") does show up as a choice but gives a "no results found" as the search results.
So according to the nVidia website there aren't any Windows 8 or 8.1 drivers for the Go (laptop) 7 Series cards, the only Windows 8 drivers that do appear anywhere are listed during a driver search for the regular (desktop) 7 series cards only, and for all versions I've tried of the desktop 7 series driver their setups all insist that the Go 7 cards are not a valid card for the desktop drivers and refuse to install.
When I search the microsoft driver library it actually gives me the same exact driver in a cab file as the XP/Vista/7-beta Go 7 Series driver that I already had from nvidia's downloads site, the same one and only Go 7 Series driver nVidia gives as the search results for 7, Vista, or XP driver searches.

 

[mj0]

I have good news for you. I have installed Windows 10 on an eight year old Compaq Presario F730US laptop with AMD X2 processor and an nVidia Geforce Go 6100 GPU and ran into the same problem you've described here: the resolution was stuck at 1024x768 and I wasn't able to install an updated driver for the "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter". However, after downloading the latest Vista driver from the Compaq/HP website and unzipping it, I was able to manually install the driver by going through device manager, selecting the display adapter, and then manually pointing the driver update procedure to the folder with said unzipped Vista driver. Had to do the same thing with a so-called "Co-Processor" and the chipset drivers (nForce 430). What can I say - it worked like a charm! I even have the Nvidia control panel available now and there are no problems left with this laptop anymore. I was not able to run setup, it kept complaining that a suppored OS (Vista 32/64-bit) was not detected. The manual procedure worked perfectly fine though.

Give it a shot, if you can't find the drivers let me know and I'll point you to the ones I downloaded off the HP website, those might work for you. The problem with these Geforce Go drivers is that nVidia never released official drivers the way they do for their desktop GPUs but instead only have a package for OEMs that they in turn have to release. Compaq, for example, never officially released Windows 7 drivers for this laptop even though it was purchased in late 2007.

 

[mj0]

And yet another step forward: while the Vista driver for the GeForce Go 6100 worked great for most things some, like web video (Youtube) were abysmally slow. I wasn't even able to watch non-fullscreen 240p video on Youtube, and was experiencing more than 80% framedrop in full screen for 720p. After doing some research I was able to hack the official 309.08 driver to install on this laptop, and video performance has improved dramatically. Firefox is still a slug for both HTML5 (Flash is ok) but with Google Chrome I am now able to watch 720p HTML5 full screen video with only minor stutter.

Here's what I did:

1. Download 309.98 from Nvidia: NVIDIA DRIVERS GeForce 309.08 Driver WHQL (64-bit), NVIDIA DRIVERS GeForce 309.08 Driver WHQL (32-bit)

2. While it's downloading identify the hardware ID of your card in device manager, mine was VEN_10DE&DEV_0247

3. Follow these steps:
* Unpack the driver using 7-zip (or any other archiving software)
* Locate a file called nv_dispi.inf in Display.Driver
* Select a similar hardware ID in the INF file (I took 242, ymmv), copy & paste and modify accordingly
* Do this for all instances of said hardware ID, it should be three lines in total
* In the final occurence of this hardware id modify the name to match your card (e.g. GeForce Go 6100)
* Reboot Windows disabling driver signature enforcement
* Run setup.exe, install the driver but make sure to forgo NVIDIA Update since it might mess things up again, reboot and go nuts