Texas Justice

I've never had to uninstall drivers in Safe Mode for a video card. Just use the ATI Software utility in Programs and Features to uninstall it in normal Windows mode. THEN reboot to Safe mode to run Driver Sweeper.

The reason for running Driver Sweeper in safe mode is that when you uninstall drivers, files are often left on the computer and Driver Sweeper gets rid of those files so that you don't get a corrupt installation. Running it in Safe Mode makes sure that the files are not in use and locked.

When you installed the new drivers and still had the UglyNoDriverInstalled look and you couldn't change the screen resolution it was likely due to a corrupt installation or old files interfering with the installation.

As for the 9.12 drivers, those were OK before Issue 17 but don't work as well with Ultra Mode, whether you enable any of the settings or not. That's one of the reasons for updating to the newer drivers.

Video card driver is way out of date. Since Dell doesn't have a new enough driver on their site, you'll need to download the Verde Notebook Release 197.16 drivers from nVidia.

Upgrade Vista to Service Pack 2. It's been out over a year now and you should have installed it long ago. It resolves several issues. You can download the five language standalone installer for x64 based systems from Microsoft here.

Once you've updated the drivers and installed Service Pack 2 try the game and if you are still having problems post fresh HiJackThis and CoH Helper reports.

I'm thinking that's the 9.12 driver based on the date. I can never tell by looking at the version number but their numbering system is basically a year.month format.

And yeah, that driver would have issues with Issue 17 I believe.

I'd recommend downloading but not installing yet the 10.5 drivers, downloading and installing (but not running yet) the Driver Sweeper program, then uninstalling the ATI software and drivers from Programs and Features in Control Panel.

Reboot the computer into Safe Mode and run Driver Sweeper. Have it remove any ATI Display entries it finds (except for the drivers you just downloaded). Reboot when prompted and let it load into normal Windows mode. Windows 7 will install drivers with no chance for you to stop it, so I generally wait until that is finished and go to Device Manager and uninstall those drivers but don't reboot.

At this point, run the driver installation package you downloaded earlier. I'd launch the game and see how things look, go into the Options and change the shader detail, apply the change then change the shader detail back to what it was. This was what I did to get CoH Helper to report correctly on my Shader Detail on one system and get rid of the ? in the report.

If it's still looking odd or acting odd, run CoH Helper again and post the results.

Indeed it is.

I know for a fact that CoH Helper runs fine on the 64-bit version of Windows 7 since I've run it on three different installations including Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

Update Vista to Service Pack 2.

Turn off the Dell Dock.

Paste the output from running CoH Helper into a reply here. Be sure to right-click and Run as Administrator on the CoHHelper file.

I've yet to have it happen on a Windows 7 system (coming up with that error) so it makes me suspect other issues (including the OS load done by the OEM). A HiJackThis report might be useful here.

The .Net Framework 3.5 is supposed to include the .Net Framework 2.0 and 3.0 both. I would look at other areas first.

Redownload CoH Helper after getting rid of the old one. It's possible that something corrupted in the download. Temporarily shut off any anti-virus and firewall software after you download it. If you are running any anti-spyware software that has active monitoring, disable it as well. It could be that one of these is interfering with CoH Helper.

If it still gives errors, I'd send a PM to Zloth about it with as much information as you can give about your computer. Out of curiosity, is this a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows 7?

You're right, I was expecting the video drivers to be out of date and my mind played a little trick on me there showing what I expected to see instead of what was really there.

My apologies.

EDIT: There is a newer driver on the Intel site, but I don't know if it will install or not. Dell and other OEM's often tweak things so that the standard drivers won't install.

There is an unsupported work-around for this and the instructions are posted on the Intel website for how to force the Intel drivers to install on a system that the OEM has tweaked.

Rassum frassum old-timer's syndrome causing brain and eyes to play tricks on me.

Dell also has updated Audio drivers for your sound chipset so I'd recommend installing that as well.

MemTest86 is good. And free. Just do the free download.

FurMark is a very intensive OpenGL benchmark that uses fur rendering algorithms to measure the performance of the graphics card. Fur rendering is especially adapted to overheat the GPU and that's why FurMark is also a perfect stability and stress test tool (also called GPU burner) for the graphics card. (quoted from their site)

It's really difficult to troubleshoot without concrete information.

Please post a log from running CoH Helper as it will give information about your system (including the drivers), and the CoH installation and settings.

Well, you have a few problems, all related to the graphics card and drivers.

There is no official support for that card under Windows 7 so the best you can hope for is that a Vista driver might work.

Dell likely has tweaked the code on the system so that the standard ATI drivers won't install.

The most likely driver that might work on that card would be the Legacy Drivers, currently at 10.2, but they'd probably need to be modified with the Mobility Modder tool.

Steam. (to answer your last question)

Looks like a bad download or installation from Steam.

Don't install from Steam.

Don't install to a Steam folder.

Uninstall what you have already tried to install.

Download the installer from the PlayNC website and run it, have it install to D:\Games\City of Heroes

Play the game once it is installed.

Just because you've used that video card to play the game before doesn't mean your video card drivers are up to date. Please paste the output from the CoH Helper report that Father Xmas provided a link to.

It will save much guesswork since we will be able to see exactly what is going on and offer concrete solutions or suggestions.

Issue 17 brought a massive graphical update known as Ultra Mode. So yes, the game has changed.

Wrong place for this.

If you look at the top of the forum where it lists the forum name, it also gives a description. That description was also on the page listing the various subsections of the forums.

You'll see that the description for this forum reads as follows:

It's apparently broken. And has been since they went to the vBulletin boards. I don't think anyone there cares that it's broken either since there's been no commentary or fixes from the reported problems.

I think part of the problem is that they don't have anyone there with a clue how to administer the vBulletin forums properly.

If you set your preference to show 500 posts per page, you won't see long posts.

Change it to a lower number.

That's not something I'll answer either positively or negatively. It's a decision only you can make.

I'd need the full model number to be able to tell for sure, but it looks like the newest drivers for your video card on the HP site are going to be from around April of 2009. That's newer than what you have, but still a bit old. Since you can see your full model number and possibly some other identifier like a serial number or some-such, I'd recommend heading to the HP website and looking to see if there is a newer video chipset driver available for your exact laptop model.

If that fails, you can "try" to install the official Intel driver that can be found on the Intel website here. It may not install due to tweaks by HP, but it won't hurt it to try it. There are known problems with the lower end graphics solutions like the Intel onboard graphics chipsets and older ATI and nVidia graphics cards, but they have released several patches to help those and are still looking into what they can do to help those players (besides breaking the game by putting broken code back into the game).

I'd recommend turning World Texture Level down to Low or Medium. Also, change your Maximum Particles to around 10000 or so. I wouldn't run it any higher than 25050 on your system.

You have a LOT of stuff running at Start up that doesn't need to be running (all of those entries in HiJackThis that start with O4). I'd kill off anything that doesn't absolutely HAVE to be running to free up memory and resources.

I'd also recommend downloading, installing, updating and running Malwarebytes Anti-Malware to scan for and remove malware on your computer such as the MyWebSearch garbage.

If you are connecting wirelessly that may also be causing part of your problems. There have been reports since I17 released that wireless connections are dropping. I'd suspect it's a buffer overflow on the wireless controller in the router, but I don't have anything running Wireless that can play the game anymore. Well, nothing besides standing in place chatting or posing for screenshots taken from my second account running on the main computer. You might want to try searching for some of those threads in this section of the forums, they may have a suggestion to help you.

Good luck.

It means your video drivers are way out of date.

Unfortunately, Toshiba has a bad habit (as do many OEM') of tweaking the code for their laptops so that you can only install their official drivers. Intel has a newer driver but the Toshiba tweaks likely won't let it install. It's still a little over a year old, but it's all that's available.

You can "try" to install it, it won't hurt anything.

You can't do math Thorny?

EDIT: Oh, that's right. Canadian rules leave out people from Quebec because they pwn the rest of the country at math so they consider it unfair to allow them to compete. Or something like that.

What is the exact name of the file you are trying to delete?

Are you logged in to the computer with an account that has Administrator permissions?

Are you trying to delete it while the game is running?