Help! Upgrading the video driver on Toshiba Qosmio G35-AV650 makes only part of desktop appear!

I am trying to run FUNCOM's "Age of Conan" on a Toshiba Qosmio G35-AV650 laptop with an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600GT graphics processor (256M video ram). This laptop is running XP Media Center with Service Pack 3. The video driver I am using is ancient (maybe 2 yrs old). I installed AoC fine, but when I went to run it, it says my video driver is out of date.

So I tried installing the Nvidia GeForce 177.92 XP x32 from http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=20269 with the associated custom INF. My problem is that after it installs fine, there is the required reboot. After the reboot, the driver does something totally wierd with my display. I am on my desktop but as if looking through a magnifying glass at only a tiny portion of my desktop which takes up the entire display however! That is, most of my desktop is not within the display, and the portion of the desktop which is on the display is magnified so it is huge. I can roll the mouse pointer off the display, and by randomly clicking, I can drag icons and windows from offscreen onto the part of the desktop which is within the display.

My problem is that while I can right click on the desktop to get the NVIDIA configuration menu to pop up (so I can try changing the resolution), the actual window must be popping off display, and I haven't been able to grab it by random clicking. I tried booting up into safe mode and changing resolution, but it doesn't stick -- when I reboot normal, I back to the magnifying glass view. The only thing that works is the roll the entire system back to the last savepoint.

So has anyone have any ideas on what I can try? I need a less ancient driver for my AoC to work!

Thanks much!

 

Hmmm, have you uninstalled the driver in safe mode, and installed an older one while in normal mode? Uninstalling the "new" drivers in safe mode should bring your resolution to quasi-normal. Then, you should be able to install different drivers.

Also, just because games tell you your drivers are out of date, does not mean you are forced to install them to play. Normally, you can ignore these messages, and play the games without a problem.

 

There must be something AoC is looking for which my (old) driver doesn't have because AoC doesn't run, complains about the age of the driver and gives me the URL to Nvidia.

With regard to my install, I didn't uninstall the old driver because I wasn't sure how the laptop would even work without a driver. Instead, I just installed the new driver in normal mode. While the install went fine and it just asked me to reboot, the problems with display occurred on rebooting the system into normal mode.

I was able to roll back to the old driver with no problem using Windows safe mode.

 

When you uninstall a driver, nothing "bad" really happens. Your resolution gets toned very low. Your computer will work perfectly fine, as long as you don't do anything that uses your video card. That gives you the chance to go online, and get working drivers, install them, and reboot.

Since you rolled back, does everything work fine now?