Re-building question.. Driver etc

NeVeR

hi,

We where given an old Dell system from out IT dept and we installed a verison of Widows 98 !! i know it's old but thats all we had....

But now we dont have drivers for the machine !.

We only want to run cubase on this system... and when i installed it it says it needs 256 colours... when i check theres only 2 or 16 to pick from !!

I serached dells sites for the Monitor drivers and found them,, burned to CD and installed on the new machine but it's still not working!

Any ideas?

tman

You'd need to search the dell site for display adapter drivers, not the monitor driver - good luck finding them if it's that old though!

Chances are you'll need sound drivers as well

NeVeR

well the monitor is not to old. I found some drivers for it.

We have a sound card that we will be installing it. But i'm sure there will be other sound drivers needed.

The display adapter drivers... should i be looking for the Model number of the monitor to find them or something else?

tman

Nah, you'll need to search the dell site for that particular model of pc and show all available drivers. It may have a service tag on the back of the pc that you could use when searching the dell site, but perhaps not if this is an older pc...

If at all possible I'd advise you to try installing windows 2000 instead, chances are it'll already have versions of the drivers included and will be a hell of a lot more stable for audio usage.

NeVeR

i have the machine in front of me... where can i get the correct model number from.. theres loads of things on it.

NeVeR

cant get it working !!.. cant find display adapters... I checked the Dell website and entered the ID tag on the machine, But none of the things are working.

I dont have a copy of 2000 wish i had.

TerrorFirmer

http://www.zhangduo.com/udi.html

That should help.

If the machine is old, installing Win2k or XP will probably automatically install display and audio drivers for you, using 98 at this stage would be an immense pain.

zilog_jones

Dell have drivers for all their systems on the website - they must be somewhere!

Are you sure you found the Service Tag? You need the one from the actual PC, not the monitor. It's usually on the back somewhere on a white label, a seven-character (might be less on older systems) code with letters and numbers. It'll end with a "J" if it's a European system. This well help you a lot getting anything from the Dell website.

Could you take a picture of the PC? I (or someone else) might be able to identify it.

Anti

A service tag will look like this:



or this:



Since your gonna be running cubase, i would reccomend you run linux and get a linux version or cubase or another audio program. As it sounds like its an old enough pc, windows + cubase will probably cripple it.

NeVeR

i got the correct tag.

It's a optiplex GX240... the one on the dell site doesnt look like the one i have tho. the one on there site is horizontal my one is vertical like normal ones... the service tag is
DY9BC0J there are some stuff there.. But nothing for the monitor. and i've isntalled a few others and it didnt work.. Like when i re-started the PC it was asking for the win98 CD !!

NeVeR

heres a pic of the tower

Orion

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?os=W98&osl=EN&catid=-1&impid=-1&servicetag=&SystemID=PLX_PNT_P4_GX240&hidos=WW1&hidlang=en

Video drivers at bottom.

Don't worry about the picture. Optiplexes are made in tower and desktop form. The hardware inside is the same though.

NeVeR

i didnt think they where what i needed. I'll try it tho.

Anti

Its not the monitor drivers you need. They are PnP ( plug and play ) its graphics adapter drievers you need.

zilog_jones

"Video", "graphics" or "display adapter" drivers are what you need.

"Monitor" drivers are a completely different thing, and not really necessary for anything made in the last decade or so anyway (why do they even supply them?).

That PC should be more than capable of running Windows XP if you have 256MB RAM or more, by the way. You can get 512MB PC133 SDRAM for about €30 second hand easily.

NeVeR

that doesnt work.

I get an error saying
"Setup was unable to find components that can be installed on your current hardware or software configuration. Please make sure you have teh required hardware or software"

NeVeR

zilog_jones wrote: »

"Video", "graphics" or "display adapter" drivers are what you need.

"Monitor" drivers are a completely different thing, and not really necessary for anything made in the last decade or so anyway (why do they even supply them?).

That PC should be more than capable of running Windows XP if you have 256MB RAM or more, by the way. You can get 512MB PC133 SDRAM for about €30 second hand easily.

It will run on the system.. It was on it. But the version of Cubase we have wont run on XP !! it's a little old. So we had a copy of 98 and installed it. thats when all this started.

Anti

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/downloads/en/downloads_splash?c=us&l=en&s=gen&~mode=popup&file=44306

That should be the driver you need.

Snowbat

NeVeR wrote: »

that doesnt work.

I get an error saying
"Setup was unable to find components that can be installed on your current hardware or software configuration. Please make sure you have teh required hardware or software"

There are three different video drivers showing in Macros42's link. I assume this model shipped with one of three different cards during its run (that's assuming your IT dept. haven't swapped the card for somethnig else entirely). Maybe you should crack open the case and try to identify your video card, or look for a system profiler that still works in Windows 98 that can identify your card (eg. AIDA32). A Linux live CD could also tell you.

TerrorFirmer

Unknown Device Identifier, if you use it, will tell you what the card is...