Earlier today, Zach posted about updating drivers for various NVidia Go cards and the frustration that usually comes along with that process. All notebook manufacturers who use these cards generally provide an ‘optimized’ driver that works well with the card and plays nice with the rest of the system. In many cases though, these drivers can hinder the capabilities of your card. And in almost all cases, updates are non-existant.

Case-in-point… I own a Dell Inspiron 8200 (yeah, I need to upgrade). When this machine was new back in 2003, it was bleeding edge and came with the quickest mobile video card on the market, the GeForce4 440 Go. As time went by, there were updates to many of the ‘official’ drivers for this machine, but there was only ever 1 ‘official’ video driver. This driver was released in April of 2003 and to give you some idea of how old these drivers are, NVidia still called them “Detonator” drivers and they were at version 42.58. Even today, this is the only video driver that Dell offers for this card/machine.

Ok… so Dell hasn’t stayed up-to-date with the drivers for this machine. Not too surprising considering they’ve released a gajillion notebooks since then and the fact that, technically, these drivers work fine. The problem is, even though this is a GeForce 4 series card, it could barely run many games based on the Quake 3 or Unreal 2 engines. It would choke and sputter even with the graphics turned down. Now, how does this make sense? The GeForce 4 desktop card I had at the time would run all these games flawlessly with the graphics cranked. Hmmm…

We all know notebooks are pricey, and they are especially pricey when you opt for dedicated graphics. So, why would anyone opt for dedicated graphics? There is only one answer… TO PLAY GAMES! So how does it make sense that a ‘Gaming’ machine would suck so badly at playing games? I knew the card had more capability than it was displaying so I began investigating. After a few weeks of searching, I came across another site dedicated to the persuit of video driver excellence, Guru3d.com. As I searched the site, I found a modified Forceware driver which supported my 440 Go card and decided to give it a try. WOW! All the sudden, the true capabilities of my card were allowed to shine and I was able to play all those games that were so doggy before. This update bumped me from Forceware version 42.58 up to version 77.70 and was enough to actually allow me to play Counter-Strike: Source (with a slightly modified cfg file) and actually hang with some of the better players out there. I prefer to play on my home rig for sure, but it’s nice to be mobile and able to play when and where I want when the chance comes up.

Now, this card is still old and there are many games it just won’t play (it doesn’t like DirectX 9 much). But, it will now play many of my older games in full detail brilliance. I can play CS Source, Guildwars, Diablo 2 (yeah, I still play it), Unreal Tournament 2004, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and many others. It’s effectively turned my poor old notebook into the gaming machine it was designed to be.

If you happen to have an old GeForce4 440 Go card, you can get these excellent drivers here. And if you happen to want to try out my custom Counter-Strike: Source cfg file, you can download it here. This cfg makes CS look like crap, but I average framerates around 70fps. Easily high enough to stay in the game.