[Junkman]

We just bought a laptop complete with an 8400M graphics card, and it has Vista installed. My girlfriend (it's really for her) doesn't like Vista, and wants to run W2K professional on the laptop instead. We have installed this, and are having problems with it. The graphics settings are very low, only allowing 16 bit colour and very low resolutions. I assume this is because the graphics card is not running properly, and perhaps needs drivers? Now I know that the 8000 series are DX10 cards and the only way to use DX10 is with Vista, but I thought you should still be able to run the 8400 card on other operating systems as long as you're not using DX10 applications. Am I wrong? I went to the NVidia site to download drivers, and the only option it gave me was to select the 8000 series range, and download a 49Mb driver .exe file, which said "cannot find compatible" something or other when I tried to run it. I thought it was odd that it doesn't ask me which card precisely I had, is it really one driver file for the entire 8000 series? Anyway, is there some way to fix this problem, or do we need Vista to make this card work?
Thanks

Edited by Junkman, 30 August 2007 - 10:05 AM.

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The problem is support for windows W2K has fallen through the floor. Microsoft no longer supports it and any new hardware such as the 8 series won't get drivers for the operating system as the user base is now extremely small and not worth the extra cost of releasing new drivers for new hardware.
So I'm sorry to say, unless you load XP or Vista you likely won't get adequate performance from the card, as the operating system doesn't support it.
James

[james_8970]

The problem is support for windows W2K has fallen through the floor. Microsoft no longer supports it and any new hardware such as the 8 series won't get drivers for the operating system as the user base is now extremely small and not worth the extra cost of releasing new drivers for new hardware.
So I'm sorry to say, unless you load XP or Vista you likely won't get adequate performance from the card, as the operating system doesn't support it.
James

[fleamailman]

if you feel that vista is not for you, and you don't want to splash out on a windows XP license, now would be a good moment to try a linux live CD to see if it pleases, it would not actually install to your harddrive but just load to the ram(so your system is untouched by testing like this though linux runs much faster when running from the actual harddrive) at least you have choice of a large number of free linux distributions to choose from, thanks