NVIDIA Forceware Drivers on Windows Vista

Having finally installed the RTM version of Windows Vista I was keen to get the NVIDIA Forceware drivers installed and see how it all worked with my graphics card (NVIDIA Quadro FX 2500M) going at full tilt. The Microsoft drivers that came with Vista certainly worked but had a bit of a flicker so I took the plunge with the beta drivers (96.85)

When I tried to install them I got this error:

The NVIDIA Setup program could not locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit

NVIDIA have a unified driver model that is supposed to mean that they only provide one driver package that covers all their graphics cards but it didn’t appear to cover mine.

As I had just installed Vista I assumed I had buggered something up with the OS but after a bit of a search around I discovered that the drivers do indeed work with all NVIDIA cards but they remove support for some using settings in the .INF file. I don’t know why they would want to do this but there you go. Perhaps with the laptop cards they are trying to encourage people to go through the laptop manufacturer for the drivers, who knows. Either way the solution is…

Get hold of a modded .INF file and then replace the one that comes with the drivers. There are more in depth instructions on the laptopvideo2go.com site and they seem to be regularly updating them as new versions of the drivers are released.

It is a strange thing that NVIDIA chooses to remove support for certain cards when it is actually there but I have to take my hat off to them for at least having Vista drivers available for download. Despite the public release of Vista being just around the corner there are still no drivers available for any of the other hardware that I have, even the biggies such as Intel or Dell. Come on… get a move on.

Windows Vista on MSDN

At long last Windows Vista has arrived for MSDN subscribers. I can barely contain myself while it downloads although I still hark back to the good old days when only those in the know would have much of a clue as to what was in store in the new version and there was still a bit of mystery…

Secret Skype Emoticons

I stumbled upon some instructions for getting secret Skype emoticons today. To unleash them on your unsuspecting contact list type one of the following, or for that matter all of the following if you are feeling a bit excitable.

(mooning) (kate) (finger) (bandit) (toivo) (headbang) (smoking) (rock) (drunk) (flag:GB)

Most of them are more or less self explanatory so I won’t bother. And to give credit where it is due I found them here.

Happy emoticoning 🙂

Microsoft goes open-source…

Well, sort of. Windows CE 6.0, MS’s device OS was launched today and along with it comes 100% of the source code under their own shared source license. Now tell me you were expecting that…