8800gts and driver "resets"

[Eyeball Kid]

I have an 8800gts and about once a month when i boot up, all I can get is 4 bit colour and 640x480. I can go to the control panel and uninstall the drivers which are shown as being still installed, and then reinstall with no problems. It's happened for the last 2 or 3 driver releases, both beta and whql. Any ideas? Hoping it's not a hardware problem, the default windows drivers give me control over all the settings, so I'm thinking not.

 

[Rattle]

vista ?

 

[Eyeball Kid]

Sorry! XP.

 

[Sr7]

One thing to note is that when this occurs, it is likely that XP isn't loading up your drivers for some reason.

To test this out.. when this 4 bit thing happens, right click your desktop and go to properties. Then click the settings tab, and check to see what it says the display is. It should say something like:

Yourmonitorhere on yourgraphicscardhere

if it has loaded your video driver properly. If the driver doesn't load properly it will say something like:

Yourmonitorhere on VGA device

or something similar to that. The only reason you should ever be forced into the 4-bit mode is if you have a borked driver install somehow.. though I'm not sure why reinstalling doesn't fix this. I know it's not a common problem though so you might try reinstalling windows fresh to see what happens. At that point if it happens again you'll know it's a hardware issue.

 

[silent-circuit]

Sounds like you've got some data corruption somewhere. Time for a format and reinstall. Also do some drive integrity checks, were I you.