The OTHER Way to Find Out What Video Card Is in Your Computer by Greg Chapman, MVP (retired)

I get a small advantage over the other writers for TechTrax; I live with the editor. That means that once a month, she goes into seclusion and starts massaging all the words the rest of us put together. Only occasionally does she come out to eat, sleep and ask for assistance. So when she sends us all a notice that our articles are up, she also asks us to quickly read our stuff and let her know of any needed changes so she can put this month's copy to bed, finally. This month, the note came and I went to read my own work (hate doing that). While there, I noticed Vic Ferri with an excellent piece on using Debug to reset your BIOS password. It's a cool trick and I'm hoping he'll save me the effort of looking in my old notes for the routine that will wipe out the partition info from a hard drive for his article next month. (Big hint to Vic!) Vic's work made me think of yet another useful Debug trick that has saved me much grief in the past when setting up an old system with a fresh operating system install. In fact, it has even saved me when I couldn't believe the settings that Windows chose and I had to verify for myself just what video card is this computer using, anyway? Quite often, the Device Manager in Windows gives the barest of descriptions for the Display Adapter it has found and sometimes it was only able to use the generic SVGA driver in order to provide you with a display. 800X600 at 16 colors? Yecchhh! So how do you find out what video controller you do have without yanking the cover off your machine? And what if it's a laptop computer? Yanking the cover off is not a convenient or wise option to take in that case (for most of us). The answer, again, is Debug. Open a command prompt (this works for all versions of Windows except NT3.51 and earlier) and type Debug. If the system complains that it can't find debug, you're probably on some variant of Windows 95 or later. In that case, be sure to specify c:\windows\command\debug. You'll be greeted by Debug's ultra uninformative prompt which is a meager minus sign (-). At the prompt, type the following, then hit Enter. d C000:0010 You should get output similar to the following: C000:0010 44 45 4F 20 0D 00 00 00-F4 00 AE 12 00 00 49 42 DEO ..........IB C000:0020 4D 20 56 47 41 20 43 6F-6D 70 61 74 69 62 6C 65 M VGA Compatible C000:0030 01 00 00 00 80 10 87 D5-30 33 2F 31 34 2F 30 32 ........03/14/02 C000:0040 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ C000:0050 E9 5B 74 00 00 00 00 00-E9 F7 11 E9 FE 11 50 4D .[t...........PM C000:0060 49 44 58 00 5B 00 00 00-00 A0 00 B0 00 B8 00 C0 IDX.[........... C000:0070 00 5B FF 7F 4E 56 00 05-14 C5 53 F0 44 01 11 03 .[..NV....S.D... C000:0080 00 00 00 00 B0 B9 44 BB-F8 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 ......D......... Type d at the prompt and press Enter again. Here's the output: C000:0090 0C 01 50 00 8C 77 71 28-55 69 AF 69 3D 6E F2 6D ..P..wq(Ui.i=n.m C000:00A0 06 6E 9F 01 C2 01 FA C0-00 01 01 00 3F 3E 37 36 .n..........?>76 C000:00B0 B4 C0 69 52 6A 80 1A 06-00 40 0D 03 00 14 B9 64 ..iRj....@.....d C000:00C0 B9 6A B9 82 B9 8E B9 8E-B9 64 B9 C0 C2 C6 C2 00 .j.......d...... C000:00D0 00 00 00 CC C2 CF C2 00-00 00 00 00 6B D0 6A 00 ............k.j. C000:00E0 00 00 00 00 D5 00 00 D2-C2 F0 6A E0 6A 00 00 00 ..........j.j... C000:00F0 00 00 00 00 50 43 49 52-DE 10 12 01 00 00 18 00 ....PCIR........ C000:0100 00 00 00 03 6E 00 01 00-00 80 00 00 4E 56 49 44 ....n.......NVID And then type d and press Enter one more time to get this output: C000:0110 49 41 20 47 65 46 6F 72-63 65 32 20 47 4F 20 56 IA GeForce2 GO V C000:0120 47 41 20 42 49 4F 53 0D-0A 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 GA BIOS......... C000:0130 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ C000:0140 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ C000:0150 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-00 00 00 00 00 56 65 72 .............Ver C000:0160 73 69 6F 6E 20 33 2E 31-31 2E 30 31 2E 34 34 2E sion 3.11.01.44. C000:0170 42 34 20 0D 0A 00 43 6F-70 79 72 69 67 68 74 20 B4 ...Copyright C000:0180 28 43 29 20 31 39 39 36-2D 32 30 30 31 20 4E 56 (C) 1996-2001 NV As you can see, output reads in this order across the screen: Memory Location—that's the part that looks like C000:0010 What's in the memory at that location—All those Hex combinations like 49 41 The ASCI translation of those Hex values—the part that looks like words! Most video cards will have their BIOS signature showing in the first block of output. Some will start later in memory and still others, like the NVIDIA card in this laptop will have the rest of the information in the 3rd block. The character, d, to Debug, means Dump Memory and that's precisely what it's doing here. So, reading the above information, what kind of video card is in this computer? There it is at the end of the second memory block dump and most of the 3rd dump: NVIDIA GeForce2 GO with BIOS revision 3.11.01.44 Now you know that all you've got to do is go download drivers for an NVIDIA GeForce2Go video card and any Flash BIOS revisions to get things up to date and finally move to a nicer screen resolution! Windows Device Manager does a good job of telling you about your Display Adapter most of the time. But it's always telling you only which driver it has loaded and it never tells you exactly what's in your system unless you have precisely the right driver loaded. Now you know how to find out for sure what driver you should be using by unleashing the ancient powers of Debug!