Adjusting refresh rates on W7 64 bit standard video drivers?

[Rave]

For various reasons I needn't go into we ended up with a slight shortage of working computers in our household. I found that my brother's old Dell Dimension 3100 was still knocking around, and plugged it into my ancient but still rather lovely Cornerstone P1500 monitor. It booted up O.K into XP (albeit very slowly), and I was able to set the screen resolution to 1600x1200, and the refresh rate to 85Hz- the picture from the Intel 915G onboard graphics was fine. However when I set about trying to clean up the XP install and put on working antivirus, Libre Office etc. the XP install proved to be too badly screwed by years of ham-fisted abuse from various other family members (I found loads of evidence of dodgy toolbars, malware etc.).

So I decided that, since it was sporting a 64 bit processor, I'd go with in install of Windows 7 64 bit. I acquired a 60GB SSD secondhand for 20 quid off a lovely fella on here, and when I discovered that a P4 650 (the fastest processor the 3100 is capable of taking) was £3.99 delivered off ebay, I whacked one of those in too. After a little bit of farting around to find a working DVD drive I had windows installed no problem, on 1GB of RAM too (it claims to need 2GB). First things first, I went to change the screen resolution from 800x600 to 1600x1200, which was fine, then went to change the refresh rate....oh. The drop down box gave me one option - "use hardware default setting".

As far as I can gather the problem is that Intel never supported Vista or W7 on the 915G platform, so the driver is a bog standard Microsoft one. Unfortunately without a proper windows driver for the onboard graphics, it can't detect the refresh rates that the monitor is capable of. I have spent hours googling for a solution to this problem, and come up blank. I've tried to get windows to install various drivers that others claim will work, with no joy- they either fail to install, or more irritatingly, refuse to even try because my hardware doesn't meet the minimum standards :angry: . I reckon my best chance of success is to hack the registry to set the default refresh rate to 85hz, but hours of poking around and googling have got me nowhere.

I know I could probably solve this problem in two obvious ways: 1) installing W7 32 bit, or 2) using the LCD monitor supplied with the computer, but I don't want to because 1) W7 64 bit seems to work perfectly in every other respect (I'm typing this on it now) and 2) my brother is using that monitor to dual screen his laptop, and if I don't use this Cornerstone my wife will be on at me to get rid of it as its so huge, and I don't want to do that.

I can't easily solve the problem by installing a cheap PCI-E graphics card and the appropriate drivers, because the Dimension 3100 has no PCI-E 16x slot (it just has one 1x slot ). However, as a last resort, I'll take a dremel to the back of it and try shoving a 16x card in!

Any suggestions gratefully received!

[grayg1]

does http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216166 not work?

[kompukare]

does http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216166 not work?

Good to know that the technical writers at Microsoft can tell their MHz, KHz and Hz from each other (not!). Or maybe they have a very fast display!

"Refresh Rate (in MHz)" indeed.

Mind you the "applies to NT 4.0" bit sounds relevant and since the article was last modified in 2006 it's unlikely to apply to Windows 7-64.

Having said that, the driver must store the refresh data somewhere, or there is a (protected) memory location which sets the refresh of the card.

EDIT: The above wasn't helpful to the original problem so: Well, if I were the OP I'd just install Win7 32 or even a fresh XP SP3. By far the fastest solution.

[grayg1]

Mind you the "applies to NT 4.0" bit sounds relevant and since the article was last modified in 2006 it's unlikely to apply to Windows 7-64.

I can find the same entry on my copy of windows 7 64bit, though it is defaulted to 1 whatever that means

[kalniel]

You need to ideally find the .inf for your monitor, or hack a .inf file to include the resolution/refresh rate info that you want to select (http://www.komku.org/2009/10/how-to-....TLvmZHAD.dpbs)

[Rave]

I downloaded rivatuner and used it to create a custom .inf but that didn't work, even after I mucked about with it trying to get the minimum refresh set to 85hz on all resolutions. I think the problem is with the standard windows graphics driver; I went looking for the .inf for that in DriverStore, and couldn't find anything about DTDs in it .

[ik9000]

i have the same machine here. Let me know if i can assist by comparison etc...

[Rave]

Please do! I spent a long time farting around with monitor .inf files last night, ended up with what somebody claimed to be an "ultimate, all modes enabled" one, still no joy. I came across a throwaway comment that Intel chipsets do not support overriding the EDID (however the EDID should be showing that the display is capable of 85hz, so I'm basically pretty mystified).

[herulach]

I suspect that a dremel is in your future, although Presumably you have pci slots? You can buy brand new pci gpus now with Matrox chipsets, maybe check them out on eBay?

[ik9000]

surely there'll be a winXP-64 driver? Have you tried that?

[Rave]

I'm pretty sure I have, yes. I even tried installing it in compatibility mode. Anyway, I've won a FireMV 2250 for £7.90 on ebay so we'll see if that sorts it!