Lower colour depth on XP than on Windows 2000

[Guest]

I have a reasonable spec PC with (amongst other things) Athlon 1400 CPU,
512MB RAM and Leadtek Winfast Titanium 500 graphics card (64MB video memory)
driving a Sony SDM-S204 flat panel monitor (native resolution 1600x1200) via
the analogue output of the video card (I use the digital output from another
PC to drive the digital input of the monitor).

The PC came with Windows 2000 Professional installed, and this happily
drives the monitor with a resolution of 1600x1200 at a colour depth of 32
bits.

I recently decided to upgrade to Windows XP Professional, which I decided to
install on a separate partition so that I could carry on using Win 2K until I
have the Win XP set up to my liking. I was surprised to find that after I had
done the basic install of XP and downloaded and installed the latest drivers
from the Leadtek web site:

- Using the NVIDIA graphics setup applet, with a resolution of 1600x1200, I
could only choose between 8-bit colour and 16-bit colour - no 32-bit colour;

- Using the NVIDIA graphics setup applet, starting with a resolution of
800x600 and 32-bit colour, the highest resolution I could choose was
1600x1024 (which looks dreadful on a flat panel monitor!).

- If I went to the "Settings" tab of the display properties and chose
1600x1200 resolution with 32-bit colour, and clicked on "Apply", the display
blanked and the monitor gave me a warning that the signal was out of range.
Fortunately, after a delay of about 15 seconds the settings reverted to
1600x1200 with 16-bit colour, and I could work again.

Can anybody point to a way out of the impasse please (apart from buying a
new graphics card...)? It seems most odd that the card will work happily with
1600x1200 resolution and 32-bit colour in Win 2K but not in Win XP.

Thanks in advance

Ian Park

 

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

Try the graphics drivers from nVidia.com (www.nvidia.com)

 

[Guest]

Thanks very much for the speedy reply, Cari. I downloaded the drivers,
uninstalled the ones I'd downloaded from the Leadtek site, switched off my
anti-virus protection, and installed. I was impressed to see that XP didn't
protest about the drivers not being digitally signed, and not having been
certified for use with XP (as it had with the drivers from the Leadtek site),
and even more impressed that after I'd installed and restarted, I could
change the resolution to 1600x1200, and found that the colour depth was 32
bit. Now I can watch pictures from my digital TV tuner card in full glorious
colour

Thanks again

Ian

 

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

You're very welcome.