In order to have a graphics board that worked with my new 22" widescreen monitor, I had installed one of my son's spare graphics boards, one of the nVidia GeForce models, because it supports custom resolutions, such as the oddball 1680x1050 the new monitor employs.
I used the driver included with the graphics board, which I figured was a couple of years old. I checked, and nVidia had one that was just two months young. I figured, what the hay. Unfortunately, it took over an hour for me to digest the hay.
Remove and Reboot
Before installing the new driver, nVidia's instructions were to first remove their existing driver, and then reboot the computer.
I did, and when the computer rebooted in VGA mode, Windows noticed the graphics board was driverless and offered to find a new driver. I turned down the offer, because I needed to run nVidia's .exe file instead. (Would a neophyte know that?)
Then, Windows seems partially paralyzed. I needed File Manager to come up to run the .exe file, but all I had was the hourglass cursor blinking at me once in a while. Even Task Manager took 5 minutes to display itself.
After about 20 minutes of waiting for things to not happen, I finally pressed the reboot button on the computer.
Install and Reboot
After the second reboot into VGA graphics mode, the computer was running fine. Dunno what the problem was before. I double-clicked the .exe file, and the install began.
Here's the part that gets me: nVidia knows that the computer will be in VGA mode during installation, yet the dialog boxes don't seem atuned to the reality of small 640x480 resolution and 16 colors. It was hard reading the dialog boxes due to the dithering. Fortunately, the only option is to select the folder in which to place the driver files. By this time, over half an hour of my time had been wasted, so I just accepted the default, because I didn't want more bad things happening to me.
With the driver installed, I needed to wait through another reboot, which takes 3-5 minutes on my 2.4GHz computer.
Resetting and Reinstalling
Back in Windows again, I needed to set the custom resolution in the graphics board to match the monitor. Even though I had asked the nVidia driver to leave behind my custom settings during the earlier uninstall, it seemed to erase them anyhow; it had no knowledge of the 1680x1050 resolution I needed. No big deal, I just reentered the info.
But through all this, Windows misplaced the driver for the monitor. It was back to using the generic monitor driver. Great. I recalled that I had a lot of trouble last time installed ProView's monitor driver, and I also recalled that I no longer recalled what steps I needed to take.
The first obvious attempt was to install the driver off ProView's CD. When that didn't work, then I remembered that it didn't work the last time either.
The next attempt was to let Windows search the Internet, but it claimed the default monitor driver was the best available. Uh huh.
Then I thought I using Add/Remove Hardware in the Control Panel. I selected the Add option, and then eventually came upon a list of monitors, which included ProView as a manufacturer and the 19" FP2226AFW model (which is good enough for the 22" model I have).
With the new graphics board driver updated, and the monitor driver re-installed, I thought I was done. But no...
Just Press Auto
I spent another 15 minutes of so puzzling over the uneven look in text and graphics on the screen. Every inch or two, the text and graphics look fatter, almost like a wave. I checked that the custom resolution was correct; yup. I tried a variety of utilities; no change.
What now? The wave-fatten effect was bothering my eyes. Suddenly, on a hunch, I pressed the monitor's Auto button. The problem went away.
Total time elapsed: 65 minutes. And now you know why I despise upgrades.
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