Resolution will not work 1

[Righty]

I have a Dell with the video built onto the motherboard running XP Home edition. It used to have 32 bit True Color. No matter how many times I try to reload the driver either from the CD or dowloaded from the internet, it still will only bring up 16 Bit true color and I cannot change the resolution better than 640 x 480. Is the graphics accelerator gone? Any ideas? There were viruses in the computer that were deleted.

 

[dakota81]

It's a total driver issue; and unfortunately sometimes the damage done by a virus can only be truely undone by reloading the OS from scratch... To be able to display 640x480 & 32bit color, all that needs is 2meg of video memory, I'm positive your Dell is dedicating more than that amount to the video card, probably a minimum of 8meg video memory.

It might not even be the drivers that the virus affected, but also maybe the programs with the OS that control the display settings before the drivers get involved.

Who knows, maybe someone else here can come up with a solution, and it is a pure software issue you're having, but I see this as the need to reinstall WinXP.

 

[paparazi]

dakota81 is absolutely correct about the driver issue but you might just want to check if you monitor has been detected as VGA default.
If so it hasn't detected a specific make/model of monitor and has sellected a much lower default monitor spec.
You could force this to default monitor SVGA and 1024x768 32bit.
But my money is still on a simple driver adapter issue.
Martin

Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.

 

[Yaremus]

Brilliant! I'm due to tackle this issue on a customer's computer this evening and this confirms what I thought. My back-up of their system will not have been in vain!
Their OS is Windows Me. Do you think re-installing on top of Win Me will resolve it?