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I bought a Sony Vaio VGN-FZ50B notebook in Japan about 5 years ago. About a year ago I updated my operating system to windows 7, but I couldn't find a version of drivers for my graphics card for my laptop which would support windows 7. So I searched for drivers for windows 7 for a notebook with the same graphics card as mine and I found one and I installed its drivers. Now for the most time it works correctly, but sometimes when I watch videos it will suddenly send my notebook to the blue screen of death(BSoD).

Recently I have had to watch a lot of videos so I've been BSoDing a lot.

One obvious solution to this problem is to go back to using windows vista and using its drivers. But I don't really want to use vista.

Instead I thought of this hypothetical solution: Since I am not using graphics intensive applications other than watching online videos, what if I disable graphics card drivers and instead use CPU for graphic processing? But for this to be possible several things must be true, which are:
1) My CPU must be able to process graphics(perhaps having some kind of internal graphics processing unit)
2) I must know how to disable graphics drivers and switch to CPU for processing.

Unfortunately I don't know any of these. Can you help me?

My graphics card is: NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT
My CPU is: Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 @1.80GHz

Sunny88
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2 Answers2

7

The Core 2 Duo family do not have the graphics integrated into the processor (here's the specs on yours).

Check out nVidia driver is not installed for x64 Windows 7 (Vaio VGN-SZ460N) and Video drivers for VAIO on Windows 7 (amongst others) to get an idea as to your choices for dealing with newer drivers for "Mobile" graphics when there's no OEM support for the newer version of Windows.

Community
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Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
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1

You will need the graphics card to boot (because the POST will fail without it), but Microsoft has developed a utility they call Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP) to use the CPU as the graphics engine.

From their documentation:

WARP allows fast rendering in a variety of situations where hardware implementations are unavailable, including:

When the user does not have any Direct3D-capable hardware

<p>When an application runs as a service or in a server environment</p>

<p>When a video card is not installed</p>

<p>When a video driver is not available, or is not working correctly</p>

<p>When a video card is out of memory, hangs, or would take too many system resources to initialize</p>
Dennis
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