Drivers
Drivers are software that makes devices run. Most computers
and devices come with stock or 'reference' drivers from one of
the device's manufacturers. These default drivers are usually
very stable and work well across many platforms, but they rarely
give the best performance the device is capable of on your particular
machine. Fortunately, many manufacturers are constantly updating
thier hardware drivers to improve them. These updated drivers
can perform miracles with performance.
For our purposes, we are only concerned with a few
drivers, the graphics card, sound card, motherboard, and the DXDirect
drivers. New graphics card drivers are simply a must: you are
cheating yourself if you dont get them, its simple as that. The
graphics card manufacturers are extremely competitive and
are always trying to improve thier drivers to get the most performance
from thier cards.
A new sound card driver can also improve things, but
in other ways. Sound cards tend to take up a lot of resources
and cause conflicts. Newer drivers can many times solve these
problems, causing less lockups, crashes, ect. Sound card manufacturers
are also pretty competitive, so it pays to check every now and
then to see if an improved driver is out.
Motherboard drivers can make a big performance difference
in some cases. Everyone should check to see how old thier motherboard
drivers are and update them if possible. NOTE: I am not talking
about BIOS here, some people have been confused about the difference
between flashing your BIOS and updating motherboard drivers. DONT
flash your BIOS unless you know what you are doing!
Finally, DirectX. The newest version of DirectX is
8.0a, I believe, and its available from Microsoft support for
free.
How do you know what device and driver you have? Get
Sisoft
Sandra, it will tell you all.
As a final note, these four sets of drivers are just
the beginning. Its usually one of these four that causes poor
graphics performance, but there are other drivers you might be
concerned with. Drivers for joysticks are another thing you may
want to check.
- Graphics Card Drivers
- Nvidia...for the newest Detonator 12.41 drivers
Natural's Driver Page...massive selection of
GEForce drivers...and others
- Voodoofiles...3dfx haven
- ATI Rage driver download page
-
- Sound Card Drivers
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Drivers
- Sound Blaster ALive 5.1 Drivers
-
- Motherboard Drivers
- VIA 4 in 1 Drivers
-
- Assorted Drivers
- Windrivers....many different drivers
-
- How To Install GEForce Graphics
Card Drivers:
- (This works well with most cards)
-
- Windows 98
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- To prepare for installation of the drivers:
-
- 1 Start Microsoft Windows 98.
- 2 Click the Start button, point to Settings, and click Control
Panel.
- 3 Double-click Display, and click the Settings tab.
- 4 Click Advanced, click the Adapter tab, then click Change.
- 5 Click Next, click Display a list of all the drivers in
a specific location, so you can select the driver you want, then
click Next.
- 6 Select Show all Hardware button, then select the Standard
display types from the Manufacturers list.
- 7 Select Standard PCI Graphics Adapter (VGA) from the list,
then select Next.
- 8 Click Next to install the driver, then click Finish.
- 9 Click Apply, then click Close.
- 10 Click Yes when Windows asks if you wish to restart the
computer.
-
- To install the drivers:
-
- 1 Click the Start button, point to Settings, and click Control
Panel.
- 2 Double-click Display, and click the Settings tab.
- 3 Click Advanced, click the Adapter tab, then click Change.
- 4 Click Next, click Display a list of all the drivers in
a specific location, so you can select the driver you want, then
click Next.
- 5 Click Have Disk, select or type the path to the folder
containing the driver files, then click OK. Windows should find
files for your NVIDIA graphics chip. If Windows cannot find the
files, check that the path name for the driver files is correct.
- 6 If Windows found the files, click OK, then click Next.
Windows copies the files to the hard disk.
- 7 Click Finish, click Apply, then click Close.
- 8 Click Yes when Windows asks if you wish to restart the
computer.