Need some advice here people. I got a labtop today at work that I believe is a couple years old and hadn’t been used for a couple months. After running some updates on it, I tried to play a DVD in it with Windows Media player. I got sound but I didn’t get picture, so I tried updating WMP. However, after getting the same problem I checked on the video card. I think it was some standed piece of crap stock card but it was funny because it didn’t list any properties, where as the other labtop in the office listed a 32mb card with all the info. I thought that maybe this card was wrong so I disabled the driver (hoping that a new card would be recognized by the machine when it restarted. Anyways, now I have no screen, when I restart. Is there any easy or more efficient way of fixing this problem, or at least getting the original driver enabled.
Any problem solving would be great. Oh, and Windows XP is the operating system.
what is the exact model number of the machine… should be somewhere on the bottom. Brand name as well, I’ll find you a driver in 5 mins. On top of that, if it has a DVD player the video card should be able to play it. I used to watch divx’s on my old Pentium 200 MMX with a 4 meg Matrox Millenium 128MB of PC66, and three 8 gig hard drives running raid 0, although i was running redhat 8, with black box. Man i miss that computer.
If you disabled the driver/device that controls your video/display, then the display isnt going to work until you enable it again… To do that, go into safemode (by holding F8 when the computer starts up.) Select VGA mode if it’s available. Go into the hardware device manager and enable the display adapter. Then reboot and load windows normally. Hopefully that will put you back at square one, without DVD but with a working screen
I’m no expert when it comes to DVD stuff, but I’ve decrypted enough to know that they require their own hardware decoder or software decoder to play the disc. I would recommend NOT using WMP to play the DVD, but instead downloading and installing a program like PowerDVD to handle DVD video. Windows Media Player sucks, and it doesn’t play DVD on my machine either.
I used to have an old ATI card with DVD support… It was a Rage II or something and not all cards had onboard decoders at that time. These days I would be amazed if a video display adapter didn’t have an onboard DVD decoder. Since your machine is only a couple years old it should have some form of DVD decoder (hardware or otherwise) installed.
Before you go looking for drivers and decoders, just try using a program that is MEANT to be used to play DVD… I use PowerDVD. Download it, and if you can’t figure out how, PM me.
If that doesn’t work, let us know. Just dont’ go disabling hardware because your movie wont play
personally i like mplayer for windows, if its windows im using… Nice and streamlined, and easy to use. No extra gui crap to take up more memory, just a video window, and text line.
