Video AWFUL - help! fonts, colors, everything

somebody help me before I murder my computer - or, it could be the monitor.... I dunno

I had a happy system, but i decided to change it anyway. old is a compaq Evo d510 with an older Nvidia Geforce 5500 256mb AGP card. good solid system but not exactly modern. I had no display issues that I can recall - looked good. The monitor is unchanged: its an older Compaq 1720 LCD, the square kind [remember those? prior to the widescreen craze].

So, I went with a small 'upgrade' moving my files to a HP DC7600, faster processor etc, and it uses PCI x16 for video. Dropped in a Geforce 7300GS.
Hooked up video via DVI cable.

The fonts [like these I'm typing now] look horrible, and the colors are odd. its hard to describe. I have changed resolutions, color densities, and font size til exasperation and nothing really helps - its just degrees of badness.
I don't know what I'm chasing.
The fonts look like something off a child's typewriter on bad paper with bad ribbon... pixelated, faint, inconsistent in color. I can make bad fonts bigger or smaller but nothing clear. :cry

I'm at a loss. is there some big file I'm missing or something? did I somehow butcher the monitor? is it monitor, windows fonts, video card settings, what? what controls font display? the card, or windows?
The display looks roughly the same whether I'm using a browser, or a windows app, or just the file manager, whatever. all roughly the same. all bad.
I'm about to revert to the old system simply because of ignorance.

any/all advice gratefully received

 

Zapp, I'm no expert, but I think that the first thing that I would tackle is making sure I used my 7300gs software disc to install the new hardware. You did use the cd with the card didn't you? Sometimes the graphics don't display correctly because of having old/bad drivers. So, you need the cd with the card to install the drivers for it.

If you did that already, I suppose maybe that your Operating System isn't jiving with the card. I don't know of any reason the HP wouldn't work with a 7300gs. HP is a terrific brand IMO. And, the 7300gs really isn't that bad a card for it's time. I had that one not too long ago. I wouldn't give up just yet. If you haven't already posted your OS, do that too. Someone more knowledgeable than myself will need that I think.

Hope that's some help. Good luck!

 

Good
first and foremost, thank you for responding.
I have my concerns about this forum. way too many unmet or unchallenged posts

Yes to all that. the cd is old. the 7300gs is not a modern card so the sofware set has been updated. I downloaded all that and it seems to have installed with no issues.

I'm suspicious of the monitor driver set.
I'm going to do some root cause testing with different monitors, and lastly with default win xp 'plug and pray' drivers.
z

 

What operating system are you using, and can you take a screenshot so we can see what you are talking about?

 

hi fred
windows xp pro sp3. I have switched everything around, using an older generic GEM 15" monitor now just to stop the irritation. the compaq 17" i'm typing on now, on the old system, where it was happier. it looks pretty good, having no monitor driver [default plug & pray] and an even older geforce 5500 AGP card, resolution at 1024x768 32-bit color, 60hz, using large fonts [the selection in the win display panel] and cleartype. I had the exact setting [among several] on the ill system and it looked much much worse, including the colors - the graphic objects [like icons] all had a glaring kind of color oddity, fonts were fuzzy, etc. What is really striking is that the crippled CPQ 1720 monitor driver is loading itself no matter what - I cannot get around it. it loads in safe mode. you can uninstall the monitor using device manager or whatever, and it comes right back on the next boot.
LIke I said, I tried to hack it out of the registry, but the registry will disallow deletion of the key, presumably cause the rascal is loaded in memory.

I may have not said this, but on the new system with the 7300gs etc, I did run a DVD movie using Realplayer as the player, and the movie looked just fine - really nice. I assume movies have their own video control

If someone could help me with the more general question of "how do you remove driver values from the registry when the registry won't allow you??"
- I would be so grateful. I should know how to get around that and I don't and that bothers me as much as the ugly screen.

what's everybody's favorite widescreen, HD-capable monitor? with the economy in the ditch, everybody's hawking gear right now at crazy prices... and I suspect month by month we will see one firesale after another - deflation will hit the pc industry hard.

 

Hey Zapp,

I don't know if these will be of any help to you or not, but your problem, being so convoluted, was interesting to me so I looked up some things on deleting stubborn registry values and found a couple links that might interest you. I personally would give them a try because I have a tendency to leave the complicated stuff up to the folks who are a bit more involved in computer biz than I am. Saves me a headache usually. Unless it's spyware, and I'm not guaranteeing anything! lol

Hope they help though.

http://www.brothersoft.com/regassassin-70400.html

http://www.finaluninstaller.com/download.php