Laptop stuck on vgasave

[Guest]

I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop (5205-S505) whose video is stuck on
vgasave. The display adapter is an nvidia GeForce 460 graphics controller. It
shows up normally in the device manager and reports that the device is
working properly. However, under the "Display Properties", it reports
"Default Monitor on *blank*" indicating that it doesn't know what the display
adapter is. The Advanced button from the Display Properties window reports
that the system is running on vgasave. The sluggishness of the display tells
me it really is running on vgasave.

I have tried completely uninstalling the nvidia display drivers and
reinstalling them. I've also tried uninstalling/reinstalling while in safe
mode with VGA enabled.

I've downloaded the latest drivers from Toshiba's website which are now a
few years old. I'd love to install newer drivers but since this is a laptop,
I'm stuck with the one provided by Toshiba.

I am at a loss for why Windows XP Pro w/SP2 refuses to use the nvidia
drivers even though the drivers were successfully installed and shows up as
working properly in the device manager. I understand the purpose of vgasave
and when Windows XP uses them but don't understand why insists on using
vgasave when properly working drivers have been installed.

 

[Yves Leclerc]

You are never stuck install only drivers from Toshiba. You should be able
to install the nVidia referrence drivers (www.nvidia.com) if the video card
is 100% based on an nVidia chip.

Head over to www.guru3d.com and locate the nVidia R.I.P. utility. This
clears out any left-over nVidia files so as to can try to successfully
re-install a nVidia video card driver. Check out their 'forums' so as to
see any other solutions.

BTW: I was also stuck in "vgasave" mode with my Geforce FX 5200 once. I
did a repair re-install to fix this! However, I hope there is now a better
solution.

 

[John Coode]

I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop (5205-S505) whose video is stuck on
vgasave. The display adapter is an nvidia GeForce 460 graphics controller. It
shows up normally in the device manager and reports that the device is
working properly. However, under the "Display Properties", it reports
"Default Monitor on *blank*" indicating that it doesn't know what the display
adapter is. The Advanced button from the Display Properties window reports
that the system is running on vgasave. The sluggishness of the display tells
me it really is running on vgasave.

I have tried completely uninstalling the nvidia display drivers and
reinstalling them. I've also tried uninstalling/reinstalling while in safe
mode with VGA enabled.

I've downloaded the latest drivers from Toshiba's website which are now a
few years old. I'd love to install newer drivers but since this is a laptop,
I'm stuck with the one provided by Toshiba.

I am at a loss for why Windows XP Pro w/SP2 refuses to use the nvidia
drivers even though the drivers were successfully installed and shows up as
working properly in the device manager. I understand the purpose of vgasave
and when Windows XP uses them but don't understand why insists on using
vgasave when properly working drivers have been installed.

The installed drivers are not working properly. Vgasave is used when
driver installation fails or the drivers are corrupt and can't be used.
Windows then salvages what it can from the drivers and runs that as a
service.
For what its worth, I fixed this once just by running the "Add New
Hardware" wizard from Control Panel. This seemed to force the computer
to search for the hardware and ask for the drivers. I had previously
tried everything possible to install the drivers (ATI Radeon). By the
way, I tried stopping the VGASAVE service using net stop but that
resulted in a blank screen on reboot and I then had to use Recovery
Console to restart the service.

 

[Guest]

I have tried installing the nvidia reference driver's from the nvidia website
but it reports that it wasn't able to find any compatible hardware and thus
refused to install. My guess was that the reference drivers work only with
non-mobile chips. The support pages on nvidia's website always point me back
to the manufacturer when trying to find support for their mobile GPUs.

The nvidia uninstaller seems to do a good job of removing all of its files.
I've even manually searched for all nv*.* files and deleted them. I'll take a
look at the R.I.P. utility. At this point, anything's worth a try.

 

[Guest]

I did think of the chipset drivers as being a possible culprit to this
problem. So I did download the chipset drivers from Toshiba's support site.
The odd thing is when I ran the installer, I see it try to install the driver
and then it just disappears. Usually, I expect an installer to come back and
say that it successfully (or not) installed the drivers and click on "Finish"
to close the installer. Either the installation was not successful or I
thought maybe Intel just didn't write a polite installer.

I'm wondering if this laptop has deeper problems here than just the display
drivers. Something that's causing the display system to not work normally.
The users that uses this laptop tends to put all kinds of stuff on it.

Thanks for the leads,
Kevin

 

[Guest]

Yeah, I understand when Windows elects to use vgasave - something wrong with
the installed display drivers. Though, you'd think that a problem would be
reported in the device manager instead of saying that it is working properly.
Also, the nvidia installer didn't report any problems during installation
either. I even see the screen blink a couple of times during installation
which I usually interpret as its doing something with the display. The event
viewer also doesn't show any problems. So the system doesn't really leave any
clues about why it doesn't like the nvidia drivers. Its like its just stuck
on vgasave.

Thanks for the tip about not stopping the vgasave service. Though I had
already personally discovered that is not a good thing to do *sigh*. Thank
god the F8 key during boot helped to easily rescue me from that little
disaster.

 

[Yves Leclerc]

Not true! If it is a nVidia chip, then the Unified referrence driver (WHQL)
will install.