XP: Finding and Installing Drivers, Part 1.0 – Motherboard Chipset

N.B. This series of articles assumes that, for whatever reason, you either don’t have the original driver CD or choose not to use it. This is often the case if you work in a PC repair shop (as I do) or you have acquired components second hand. The introduction to this series is here.

Whether you are building a PC or reloading an existing one, the first thing you should install after the operating system are the motherboard chipset drivers. These drives are associated specifically with the northbridge (where applicable) and southbridge, rather than any other chips which may be present on the motherboard to provide other functionality such as audio or networking.

Motherboard chipset drivers are easy to overlook. Device Manager may not flag them as missing. They are responsible for the smooth running of your IDE and SATA drives, USB Ports and AGP slot. If you are wondering why your hard drive seems slow, or your new graphics card is not performing well, perhaps you are missing your motherboard chipset drivers.

The main motherboard chipset manufacturers all have sets of drivers which can be installed on almost any brand of motherboard. All you need to do is identify the chipset and you can select the appropriate drivers.

You can often identify the chipset manufacturer by looking at the southbridge, which is usually visible. (The northbridge is often covered by a heat sink so it is not visible.) You may also be able to guess the chipset from the model name, although this requires some experience. It isn’t a guaranteed method since some motherboards do not have their model name clearly marked and not all motherboard manufactures use an easy to follow naming scheme. Another way is to use a utility. I use CPU-Z and/or AIDA32. CPU-Z is quicker or this purpose. AIDA32 will become indispensable later on, since it provides much more information.

Remember, for most cases you only need to know the chipset manufacturer. The specific chipset is rarely necessary. There are 5 major motherboard chipset manufacturers, SiS, VIA, Intel, nVIDIA and ATI.

The following installments in this series will discuss, in turn, the different motherboard chipset manufacturers. Links will be provided to the driver packs.

XP Troubleshooting: Audio Drop-Outs in Games

If you experience audio drop-outs whilst playing older windows games under XP, try turning down the Audio Acceleration in the Audio Settings in Control Panel.

A colleague encountered this problem recently. Some of the sound effects and music were working, but some of them were dropping out randomly. The game itself was running fine otherwise. The solution was to turn off Audio Acceleration. I was probably a deficiency in the game engine.

XP: Finding and Installing Drivers, Part 0

Whether you’re reloading Windows or adding/replacing hardware, you are probably going to need drivers. Windows XP has a large number of drivers built in. Sometimes these default drivers are best, but sometimes they should just be viewed only as a temporary solution.

You may have a driver disk that came with the hardware. Often these drivers are useless, but occasionally they are essential. If your hardware is from some obscure manufacturer you may not be able to download a driver. OTOH, drivers are often updated so it’s usually worth searching online for more recent versions.

You may find drivers that are provided by the manufacturer of the hardware, such as Gigabyte, Asus or MSI. Often these are just re-packaged drivers written by the chipset manufacturers, like VIA, SiS or nVidia. You need to decide which driver you should be looking for.

The Device Manager can help you identify which drivers are missing, but it can be deceiving. There are some motherboard chipset drivers which aren’t necessary for the system to function, but without them the system will not perform optimally. These drivers are not flagged by the Device Manager as missing.

I’ll be discussing all of these issues in a irregular series of posts, along with specific details, personal experiences and general principles. When it’s all done I hope I will have compiled the ultimate current guide to finding and installing drivers for Windows XP.

The series continues with Part 1.0 – Motherboard Chipset Drivers.

OSX: Google plus Safari WTF!!!!!!!

This is what is wrong with technology. One day it works and the next day it doesn’t. No wonder the average computer user barely manages to hold on.

Yesterday I could drag links out of a Google search and dump them straight into a draft blog post in ecto. Standard procedure in a modern OS like OSX. Today it no longer works. I can drag and drop other links, even links on the Google site EXCEPT SEARCH RESULTS.

I had the perfect system for almost 24 hours. The beauty of dragging links out of Safari is that it keeps the original link text and the underlying URL, so you don’t just end up with the URL text, you get a nice pretty link ready made with no work required to fit it into the text.

So I’d write a post in ecto, and see a word or phrase that should be a link. I select it, right-click, and select ‘Google Search’. Safari opens and does a search and I choose the relevant link and drag it into my post.
So now I have to open up the page and drag the link from the address bar. Oh, well, I can live with that. It still sucks.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to vent my spleen about the stupidity that often ruins otherwise great ideas. Until now I’ve not had an actual, good, proper, rant. Inconsistency can be a killer. The best technology, the mundane stuff like reticulated water, telephones and cars, is the best because most of the time they just work, and work the same way each time.

And now that I’ve had my rant, I think the solution to the problem has just occurred to me. Yesterday I was not ‘logged in’ to Google in Safari and this afternoon I logged in. That is the only thing that I know of that has changed in the mean-time.

I’ve just logged out of Google in Safari, and what do you know… it works properly the way it did before. So there you go, some practical problem solving and a rant.

Sometimes it just helps to get things off your chest.

OSX: Google plus Safari WTF!!!!!!!

This is what is wrong with technology. One day it works and the next day it doesn’t. No wonder the average computer user barely manages to hold on.

Yesterday I could drag links out of a Google search and dump them straight into a draft blog post in ecto. Standard procedure in a modern OS like OSX. Today it no longer works. I can drag and drop other links, even links on the Google site EXCEPT SEARCH RESULTS.

I had the perfect system for almost 24 hours. The beauty of dragging links out of Safari is that it keeps the original link text and the underlying URL, so you don’t just end up with the URL text, you get a nice pretty link ready made with no work required to fit it into the text.

So I’d write a post in ecto, and see a word or phrase that should be a link. I select it, right-click, and select ‘Google Search’. Safari opens and does a search and I choose the relevant link and drag it into my post.
So now I have to open up the page and drag the link from the address bar. Oh, well, I can live with that. It still sucks.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to vent my spleen about the stupidity that often ruins otherwise great ideas. Until now I’ve not had an actual, good, proper, rant. Inconsistency can be a killer. The best technology, the mundane stuff like reticulated water, telephones and cars, is the best because most of the time they just work, and work the same way each time.

And now that I’ve had my rant, I think the solution to the problem has just occurred to me. Yesterday I was not ‘logged in’ to Google in Safari and this afternoon I logged in. That is the only thing that I know of that has changed in the mean-time.

I’ve just logged out of Google in Safari, and what do you know… it works properly the way it did before. So there you go, some practical problem solving and a rant.

Sometimes it just helps to get things off your chest.

Rootkit Remover from Grisoft

It’s only a beta and I haven’t tested it personally.
AVG Anti-Rootkit 1.0.0.13 Beta

Brother printer driver problem in Word

We have just fixed a PC which had an odd problem where Microsoft Word was losing focus and some buttons were appearing momentarily in the wrong place. The following processes were found to be causing the issue.

brss01a.exe – brss01a, Brother print process
brsvc01a.exe – brsvc01a, Brother print process

The buttons in question are the ones that normally appear near the scroll bars – page down, page up, browse object etc. They only flash momentarily. Killing the two processes listed above stops this from happening.