MaximumPC 2008 10

The Hunt for

Vista Drivers

Some time ago I purchased

a Dell E1705 laptop with

almost all the options. I was

very happy with the laptop

and its GeForce 7900 GS. It

allowed me to play just about

any game on the market.

Everything was great until

I upgraded my machine to

Vista, but I can’t find any

Vista drivers for my 7900 GS.

I’ve been waiting for

more than a year now, and

there’s still nothing from

nVidia or Dell. So I was won-

dering: Do you know how

I can get my card to work

right? I would even take

homemade drivers at this

point if I knew where to find

some!

—Chris Lingle

A solution to your predicament

is quite simple. Go to Dell’s

website (www.dell.com) and

click the Drivers & Downloads

link. Next, choose the Inspiron

E1705 from the provided list;

you’ll then be taken to the offi-

cial downloads page for your

laptop. Select your operating

system and click the Video tab

at the bottom of the screen.

A list of drivers will pop up,

including a December 2007

release of Nvidia drivers for

GeForce Go 7800 and GeForce

Go 7900 GS cards.

If you’re running 64-bit

Vista, the Doctor is sad to

inform you that you’re hosed.

Dell doesn’t have a driver for

your card for that version of

the OS. We recommend the

following solution only as a

last-ditch approach because

following these instructions will

void your card’s warranty. That

said, third parties will often

create customized videocard

drivers based off the latest

Catalyst or Forceware releases.

NGO (www.ngohq.com) is one

of the more popular brands of

customized drivers. At the site,

you can download one of their

driver packages. It’ll come with

support for both Vista 32-bit

and Vista 64-bit, GeForce 2- to

8-series cards, and all GeForce

Go cards. The Doctor still main-

tains that you’re best off using

the Dell-approved drivers—

unless, you truly have no other

alternative.

A Steamy Issue

I downloaded BioShock

through Steam a couple

weeks ago and have had

trouble getting it to run.

Sometimes it will randomly

crash and send me back to

the desktop with a message

that tells me the display

driver stopped working and

has recovered successfully. I

have to restart the program

through Task Manager to get

it to run again, but I can only

play 5 to 10 minutes at a time.

I have an Nvidia GeForce

8600M GT in a MacBook Pro

running Vista 32-bit.

—Sean Thomas

Unfortunately, this is a problem

that plagues a number of Steam

users. Countless forum threads

about this very issue are on the

Steam troubleshooting boards.

The Doctor suspects that

this error is related to the size

of your operating system’s

paged pool memory (http://

tinyurl.com/56frol). But

users have reported vary-

ing degrees of success after

applying the registry hotfix,

so don’t fret if this doesn’t

work for you.

As it stands, you’re in for

a round of troubleshooting.

Valve itself has a number of

potential fixes—try them at

your leisure (http://tinyurl.

com/6fzhqg). If none of them

works, you can also try run-

ning BioShock in a window.

It’s not the best solution, but

it has worked for the Doctor

on occasion. You can also

try adjusting your graphics

settings in BioShock to the

minimum. Installing dif-

ferent or newer versions of

your Nvidia drivers is also

an option.

The Doctor isn’t avoid-

ing your question. On the

contrary, he’d love to have a

permanent fix for the identi-

cal problems that plague

his Steam games. And it is

a Steam issue: The Doctor

would bet a day’s salary on

the fact that if you installed

and played BioShock using a

CD, you’d be just fine.

Backing up My Game

My question regards back-

ing up games using tools

like ImgBurn and Daemon

Tools. I use ImgBurn to cre-

ate the ISO from a disk and

Daemon Tools to mount the

ISO. But for some reason,

with half of my games I get

the message “Please insert

the original disk” when I try

to run the game from the ISO.

My method works with older

games but not newer ones.

I understand that some of

these games might have some

kind of protection on them

preventing me from running

them off an ISO, but I paid

for these games and I should

be able to create backups of

them. Do you know how I can

back up my games so they

actually work?

—Sgt. Christopher Basquit

Your question opens

up a bucket of worms,

Christopher. The technical

answer is easy: Developers

include protection mecha-

This month the Doctor tackles...

Driver Updates



Driver Updates



Driver Updates

Missing Drive

Driver Updates

Missing Drive

Driver Updates

Steam Troubles

See that error message? You won’t for long. An issue with the

Steam driver can send your videocard into a crashing loop until

your rig fi nally blue screens.

DOCTOR^

IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE ONE STEP AT A TIME

78 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC|OCT 08 |www.maximumpc.com