Toshiba P105-S9722Laptops are becoming more popular. More people are forgoing the traditional desktop PC in lue of notebook PC’s. The portability, the fact that you don’t have to stay within the confines of your desk and since they are starting to put some real power in some notebook models, they have become pretty attractive for PC owners.

The problem with notebook PCs are that some drivers are only available by the notebook manufacturers, and lets face it, many manufacturers just aren’t too quick to keep those drivers updated. My first notebook PC was a Dell, and right from the beginning, I needed updated drivers to get a game I was currently playing to run without some known graphical glitches. The solution on the help section of that particular game’s website (cant remember which game it was) was to update the Nvidia drivers to a certain version, which wasn’t available from dell. I headed over to Nvidia’s website and downloaded the drivers that I needed. Went to install them and to my surprise, they wouldn’t install because it said my video card wasn’t supported.

This is a problem you will run into with a lot of notebook PCs, even though you have "XX" video card in your notebook, and the drivers you downloaded from Nvidia, or ATI are suppose to be for the card that is in our notebook, they will not install.

The reason?

Each set of drivers have a file inside call an ".inf". inf files contain the information needed to let the driver install program know if the video card installed in your PC is compatible with that driver. Most PC video cards are made to support the reference drivers, which are the core driver set that is offered by chipset manufacturer (Nvidia or ATI). The video cards that are in notebooks, while may also be compatible with the reference drivers, usually have proprietary settings or bios’s that makes the card appear incompatible to the drivers offered at Nvidia or ATI. You are essentially at the mercy of the notebook maker, and like I said before, who knows when they will release an updated driver…if they ever will.

What do you do?

There are ways to get around this little problem. The video card that is in your notebook does have those proprietary settings etc, but the chipset is still an Nvidia or ATI chipset for whatever model card you have in your notebook. How to get around it is by modding the "inf" files that are in the drivers you download to include your notebook’s video card.

Sounds complicated doesn’t it….well if you don’t have a clue what your doing, it can be complicated, and Im not going to try to tell you how to do it now. An easier way is to find drivers or inf files that are already modded, and there are a few places online that offer such drivers.

  • One place I have been going to get modded drivers is Omegadrivers.net.  They offer drivers for both Nvidia and ATI video cards, for multiple operating systems. Currently there are no Vista drivers but they are working on getting those up. The Window’s XP drivers in most cases will work in Vista but you may have some glitches.
  • Another such place is Laptopvideo2go.com. In the forums they have modded inf files for just about every new Nvidia driver released, You may have to do a little reading to find out how to replace the inf with the modded inf that is offered at that site.  (Currenty the site seems to be down, but I just visited them yesterday and it was working).

Most are pretty easy to install. With the Omega and Xtreme-g drivers you just download the driver install file and run it and it installs the drivers. over at Laptopvideo2go, there may be a little more work involved, but if you read around on that website, you should beable to figure it out.