Captain1328

Ok....I saw in another thread - about Half Life - where you can check your PC to see if certain games will run.

A little background here -

I know our graphics card is outdated. It took forever, but I found an update to the graphics driver we have, but it was dated 2003 and no more updates will be made to it. - It's a SavagePro blah blah whatever.

My main question here is - to play the Sims 2, it recommends minimum ATI RADEON 7200 Series, NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS/Pro/Ti)


We can play the Sims 2 since we updated what we have, but it's slow and choppy. We did the XP Game Advisor thing and it basically tells us that our graphics card is crap....lol

How does one go about installing one of the aforementioned graphics cards/drivers..whatever? Is it simply software that you buy, or is it hardware that has to be installed? What's the going rate for an upgrade like this? This is one area of computers that I'm kind of lost on.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

I'll check back later ....thanks all.

Lord Odin

Installing a driver is as simple as installing any program. Click, click, click, done. If a game is playing very poorly even on lowest display settings, the only improvement is to change the card itself. Often driver updates can improve performance, but not so much to remedy what you're talking about.

The most important things to check on though, is whether or not your computer has a slot open for the card. First, see if the current graphics card is even a card at all. It may just be built onto the motherboard (onboard). If that's the case, then you need to see if you have an AGP port, and if not, if there's an available PCI port. If it's not onboard video, you just need to find out which kind of port the current one uses.

Find out which one of those your Savage Pro fits into, and I'll help ya through choosing a replacement and how to go about installing it if that's what you want to do

V2

I know it's this way with NICs, and would imagine it would be the same for a graphics card...if you buy one, the software accompanying it, will require you preinstall, then after that is complete, you power down, and make the switch. Power back up, and bada bing, new graphics.

Unfortunately, when I was getting paid for this ****, all of our computers were on warranty, so we'd only replace bad graphics cards with the same exact model, where just the physical change would need to take place.

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natas

swap the cards, the drivers should be included in the OS. If they aren't, the worst that will happen is the display will be 16 bit until you get the drivers downloaded/installed.

TonyMontana

If u give me comp specs, I can tell you what card would be best for you. I know your on a budget so I can give a recommendation on what card to get for each price point.

A Geforce 4 Ti4200 can be found for around $70-80 nowadays and thats the best performing low-end card on the market, bar none.

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Hunny_Bear54

We are? what the hell has Cap been telling you?

TonyMontana

shhh....its a secret

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bizell

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Se...3&Sku=P450-8602

this card is only $20 after mail in rebates..

8x agp, 128mb...

you're probably going to be upgrading from this one, too, though if you want to play more higher-end games.

Captain1328

Thanks for the responses and suggestions everyone. I'll do some searching around the local retailers and what not to see what's available. I guess I better find out if our card is ''onboard'' or whatnot...

What kind of task am I looking at...opening the tower? That's something I've never done so I want to make sure I know what I'm doing before I tackle it.



Yeah...whatever we buy, I want to make sure it's going to be good enough to last awhile as far as usability goes.

Captain1328