Well, my brother in law has just got lfs and we are having some serious problems with it. It was just about working on his old riva 64 gfx card, but the textures where a mess, especially the road surface, it was all tiny multicoloured, glitchy dots so i guessed a dead gfx card. I have tried my old geforce3 200 ti, and my mx440 card in here and if anything it is worse! This is what it looks like now on the first screen. If i try and go any further then the whole display goes black and all there is is a jagged shard of colours jumping around in the top left corner. I know for a fact that the 2 cards i have tried are ok as they both work in my pc. Any other ideas of what may cause this horribleness???

Be careful with the picture name, nowadays people don't understand it as 'cheerful', they'll see discrimination in that

looks pretty gay to me

Oh yeah, i just remembered to mention that you can watch anything on youtube and it is perfectly clear, as is the rest of the display in windows xp. He also says that half-life plays ok as well, strange... I have re-installed lfs Z using a clean install, not the patch from y version, when i switched the pc on after both card changes xp found the relevant windows standard drivers for the cards i had fitted, but i went to the nvidia site straight away and got the latest drivers so no problems there. The first time i started LFS (with both cards) i got a cannot find a suitable screen resolution possible graphic card driver problem error, that was because the moniter had set itself to 640x480 for some silly reason. I set it to 1024x768 and that was when i got the horrible screen that can be seen in the picture in my first post. All other screen resolutions give the same horribleness as well. I cant figure this one out!

Thanks Dan for all your help hopefully this will be sorted out soon i realy want to play LFS lol

Hey ash, you remembered your password now! I take it its still the same?? Does half life still play ok??

i dono i haven't tried half-life agen yet i'll try it now ok

erm i just tried half-life it still works but the texture is a bit random now lol

It must be something to do with the motherboard then because the card that is in there now is definately perfectly ok. Have you still got that old tiny tower case pc?? Maybe we can swap the ram,graphics card and processor (if it will fit) from your pc to that one and see if it runs? It will need a fresh install of XP but we can do that tomorrow if you want and see what happens.

what other pc of mine

oh that one no we aint got that one now sorry dan

It's almost exactly like a graphics card problem, but if you say that it's fine, then I'm stumped...Have you blown out dust from the PC? The card might be overheating, but it would still be fine in another PC with better cooling. Check the temps, if your card's software has readings...Might as well check for bad RAM if that doesn't fix it...

yes i've blown out dust, i have a fan on the graphics card but i don't know about all this graphic card stuff so i don't know my brother in law danthebangerboy is tryin 2 help me out, read what he said.

look at the pic on the first post

I think i have figured it out! Every time i put a BETTER graphics card in, the in game display gets WORSE. i dont think the the power supply unit is powerful enough to run these bigger cards and as a result it is getting hot, REALLY hot!

I'm not sure of the ratings of it but after attempting to make the mx440 work again today i think that could be the problem. after running the pc for about 10 minutes, if you touched the psu after shutting down then you couldnt bear your hand on it for more than about 5 seconds before it was too much.

I have now put the old graphics card back in (old nvidia riva 32mb thing) And it was still horrible, like watching a fuzzy tv screen with multicolured little blobs everywhere and really low fps, like 2 fps with jerky sound and impossoble to really drive, but at least you could see what was going on, and it was a lot better than the screenshot attached to the first post (screenshot taken when we had the geforce3 200ti 'inno3D' card in there, with the mx440 it was even worse!)


I then set the screen settings to 800x600 16 bit, (it was on 1024x768 32 bit before) I then went into the graphics menu and disabled the haze effect, changed the setting in there to 16 bit, turned off sky, all lod, shadows, turned off vertical sync,set all the MIP bias to the lowest settings, texture filtering set to none and the picture is a lot better than it was, still some random artefacts in places, like the edges of the track and some parts of the cars and odd bits of scenery but its better.

You have to play the game in chase mode because if you use cockpit mode the fps dives from 18 to about 2, but it is kind of playable. Its only an athlon 966mhz cpu which has 680mb ram and the original 32mb gfx card so we were never expecting miracles but at least its kind of playable now.

The only strange thing was with the newer cards, you could watch youtube videos, go on any website and the display was perfect, i take it this is because when watching something like a video online, the gfx card only has to display what you see, and not create it and render it as it does in game.

update or reinstall OPEN GL Driver/software

there's nothing strange about a card being able to run 2D objects and not 3D objects. the psu is the issue.

clean your psu fan and make sure it's clean too. remember to be careful.

well ok i will clean my psu but wot is the psu sorry i'm not that tecnical
so are you sure it's the psu

It's the boxy thing at the top back of the PC. Where you plug in the power lead

(probably not the best idea to run the PC with the side panel off, but if I keep the animals and small children away it'll be fine )

ok i'll ask my brother in law danthebangerboy if he can come round and put in the graphics card and i'll try cleaning up the psu and running my pc with the side pannel off ok

Nono, don't run the PC with the panel off! I just did it for the photo

If LFS looks like that if you run it straight after startup, then it isn't the PSU fan. But it's still a good idea to regularly blow out the computer, I do my fans once a week and the whole case once a month. And if LFS does look like that on startup, and gets worse with better graphics cards, then it's probably the PSU itself isn't strong enough. If you bought the PC from a manufacturer (Dell, HP, etc.) then the chances are that the PSU is only capable of running the hardware that came with the PC

Do Not Use A Hoover!!!!

Quote from dadge :

Do Not Use A Hoover!!!!

No, use a specially trained cleaner hamster, you can get them from PC World (Franky told me about them) You have to give them a small electric shock first but don't worry, to them it's just like having your toe nails cut, this way they attract more of the dust.

Once you've done that put the little fella inside your PC case, close it up and leave him alone for a few hours, but don't sit and watch as they don't like it and will refuse to work....whatever you do, don't feed it after midnight.

I said blow not suck (no innuendo intended, honestly...). I meant compressed air Who would think using a hoover is a good idea anyway? I'd rather use Harry the Hamster

i can think of one person.............starts with a H and ends with an arjun