lo guys
I just joined here today because i am stumped with a problem i cannot solve. Others have tried and failed, lets see how good you are
Please dont read unless your pretty fed up and have some time to kill and can read it sloooowly, this is looooong.

In XP pro i had a geforce 3 it works fine etc no probs at all, a doddle to install. I uninstalled this card to replace it with a Geforce 4, XP will not install these cards so you gotta do it yourself.
After uninstalling the old card and rebooting, XP detects the change (not the card) and asks for drivers, i duly point it to the cd (correct place) and get an error pertaining to something like, 'the drivers you are trying to install do not match the hard ware on your machine, no probs i think, i'll just switch the display adapter to standard pci display adapter and update its drivers that way. trouble is there is no 'generic' display adapter listed. It just shows a number of Nvidia cards that will not let me install over it the drivers for the G4.

I have tried this through add hardware wizard (error) device manager (error)
The one thing that stands out in this is when the geforce 4 is in, there is an entry in device manager, its called (and this is *exactly* how its written )

Video controller (VGA compatible)

and this entry has the yellow ? on it.


If i try to install a driver for this entry i get an error, if i put the geforce 3 in, that entry in device manager is gone and i can install the drivers for the G3.
This happens on a clean install and on 2 different machines, there is nothing wrong with the G4, im using it now on a win2k machine and have used it on a win 98 machine.
I HAVE tried to install the card using an .exe (self extracting driver) and get an error saying the same things as above or the drivers are wrong etc.

I know how to install drivers, i've been doing it for years, i may not have explained things to clearly,(i hope you guys see where i'm coming from here) but i really need some ideas as to why this is happening and what can be done.
BTW, this also happens when i try to install an ati radeon 8500, it seems like if the card isnt in the XP list of cards it knows it will through the error in device manager and will not let me install.

Bit of a ramble but cheers for any help you guys can offer.


Axel