Notebooks and Graphics and Holes in the Ground

Something of a breakthrough today. Number one son has been happily using his shiny new notebook for all kinds of things, but has noticed that some games behave very badly. Today we got a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator (or Simulatore as the billing sheet rather fetchingly described it) 2004. This worked fine, except that the instrument panel was just a brown shape on the screen. Apparently there are a number of switches and dials in the front of the plane which are kind of important to your average pilot.

Nobody seemed to know the answer to this one, until I spoke to Derek. He has been using a laptop for all his university work for a while and was well versed with the problem. It seems that laptop manufacturers change the internal references for the graphics hardware so that standard drivers don't configure themselves correctly. Result, all kinds of random behaviour in graphics mode. He provided the solution in the form of links to a couple of sites: http://www.warp2search.net and http://www.geocities.com/Madtoast/. The latter provides a neat program which will build an inf file which makes the drivers happy, and now all is well. Take a look at these sites if you want to get the best out of your notebook's graphics hardware

Oh, and FS 2004 is great fun. You even get to try and fly the Wright Brother's first plane. This would be quite a good party game, in that it is great fun watching people try to stay in the air for more than three or so seconds...