Driver questions

[Doball{MEOW}]

Ok so I'm getting sick of spending hours searching for the right drivers, only to quit in frustration without doing anything. So I downloaded Driver Detective, and it says I have 15 out of date drivers (might explain some of my gaming issues). I see a lot of devices I don't understand. Is it safe for a unexperienced guy like myself to mess with some of these things? PCI Bridge, IEEE controller? Sounds like I have the potential to make my computer useless if I screw it up.

[Raidien{MEOW}]

your motherboard should have a specific model number imprinted on it... go to the manufacturers website and search for the exact model of the board... they usually have the up-to-date drivers for your pci bridge, ieee, etc...

do you use onboard graphics / sound / ethernet / etc? if not, what devices have to plugged into your computer (eg: pci, agp, pci-e, etc)? if your mobo has onboard that your not using, go into the bios and disable those devices... sometimes the irq's and such conflict with each other...

[Smooth*{MEOW}*]

Only drivers I've ever updated were sound and video.

[Doball{MEOW}]

I'm running off a wireless laptop, so mobo is inacessable, as far as onboard items I don't think so. My bios is pretty much useless. The only things I can do there are set boot order and turn the IR and card reader on and off.

Driver Detective scans the hardware and drivers and searches it's database of over 1 million drivers for the current versions that apply the scaned hardware. So I feel ok about what it's telling me, but I'm afraid to get into bus controllers and host controllers.

The reason I'm trying to get this figured out, is that I get a lot of CI's and hig pings when playing and my FPS is always below 20 in game. That's with everything in CoD 4 set to low. When I bought this computer BF2 had been out for a few months, and I had bad problems with that game. Stuttering screen, lost connections for 1/2 to 3 seconds. Now I'm just sick of it. It takes the un out of gaming when you just get someone lined up, then you freeze for a second. I'm on my second router (motorola, first was linksys), hardwiring by cat5 doesn't help, so I decided to get kind of crazy with internal problems.

I frequently run Reg Cure, Spybot S&D, Page defrag, disk cleanup/defrag, and now Driver Dective. But I still get crappy performance out of a decent machine. 3.0Gig P4, 2Gig Ram, PCI-e 256 meg GforceGo 7800GTX, Ralink 802.1 G internal wireless card, and a Realtek high definition audio card. Not a bad system yet, better than a lot out there, but I get crappy performance. So with everthing else clean, I'm looking at drivers.

[Jugulator*{MEOW}*]

make sure flow control in ON for the etherent ports you are using on your router, etc. ( i turned mine off in my router and it acted like your saying).
click the optimize button in cod4. (Gunner had a problem lke yours and thats how he fixed his)
sounds like it could be a problem with your internet. have you been to www.dslreports.com and then tools tab? run the line quality test.
you can also run the tweek test to optimize your settings.  and of course the speed test.
you may also want to run smokeping.

[Raidien{MEOW}]

if you go to your laptops manufacturer site and lookup your notebook model, they should have the latest driver packages there...  maybe try testing it without the router... just connected straight to the dsl/cable modem? (you may have already done this, but just trying to check on all the little things :P)

[Doball{MEOW}]

Laptop website is behind, the Nvidia driver is even out of date. Very poor customer support (Clevo btw) I have connected by wire before with almost no noticible improvement. Right now I'm going through each setting in the router one by one.

But back to the origional question about 5 of my chipset drivers are out of date, but I'm afraid that if I'm doing the wrong thing I'll disable something that will take my computer down. The other side of that is I'm concerned that things aren't talking as well as they should, and slowing my performance down.

Jug, I'm not really sure what you mean by flow control, I don't have that selection.

[Kitty*{MEOW}*]

OK what Chip set do U have.


 If its VIA i have had trouble in past with this chip set. I never know which drivers go to which board its not as neat and clean as NVIDIA's Unified Drivers.


   If Its NVIDIA then all U gotta do is go to their site www.nvidia.com and DL the Nforce Drivers for your chipset or Video drivers for Video card. Also now Most people will over look this one. The sound card, if your sound drivers are outdated then it can cause your game to hiccup and even freeze while playing a game.


 Memory, If U got a stick about to go out then it will start loosing info and eventually start leading to the old BSD (blue screen of Death). There are several programs out that U can use to stress test your memory and it gives a pass or problem indication. U should check the Memory Manufacturer's website for one of just google online for a Memory Stress test program I will see if I can find one for U and post it back here.



OH, and YES u can screw things up by updating drivers U definatly want to make sure U got a back up of your system before doing so. Make a restore point before changing any driver.

[Doball{MEOW}]

All my regular stuff is good. Nvidia, sound, and wireless/nic drivers are all up to date. I didn't think about memory problems, but I've had this "glitching problem" since I bought the computer. Unless any of you feel I should mess with the PCI or IEEE drivers, then I'll just keep messing with the router settings, and maybe try a plug-in wireless card. I've wondered if I should try that all along. I never had this problem when my card and router were from the same manufacturer.

[Felix*{MEOW}*]

And please DON'T flash the Mother Board.. your laptop will turn in to a paper wight in some cases. Some laptops have a replacable Bios chips and some don't.. eather way you will have to shred it if the bios flash doesn't work to even find out if the bios chip is removable.

[Kitty*{MEOW}*]

not true anymore felix Most manufacturers have a backup in place where it auto saves the original bios if it doesn't take it will automatically reinsert the old one, or U can update Via CD Rom by putting it on a CD and its much easier. but i would NOT attempt this if you haven't done it before.

[Felix*{MEOW}*]

not true anymore felix Most manufacturers have a backup in place

his isen't a new lappy kitty. it's 2 years or more.