Graphic card Problems?

[Anonymous]

My boss is having some problems with her laptop. In one particular project when she views in 3D (open GL), a number of glass french doors show up with a wood material covering the entire door. Selecting the door and opening the door settings dialog box and then closing the dialog box without making any changes, corrects the problem until a new 3D window is generated. If I open the same project on my computer I do not have the same issues.

My initial guess is that it has to do with the graphic card. She has a "NVIDA GeForce4 440 GO" card with 64MB of memory on a Dell Latitude P4-M 2.0 GHz 512MB RAM. I have attempted to contact NVIDA to find out what is the most current driver available for this card. Their web site indicates a driver for all GeForce cards but the accompanying literature does not list this card as one of the supported cards. Contacting NVIDA is almost impossible and I have thus far had no response. Any suggestions or recommendations for this issue will be much appreciated.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

Beacuse the video card is a "mobile" crad, NVidia is likely to tell you that updated drivers are only available from the laptop maker - Dell in this case. (that's the way ATI deals with drivers for their mobile cards).

Before mucking with video drivers which are pretty touch and GO with the GO cards at the moment, check the settings of the door object. It may be simply a matter of adjusting parameters for this door and all similar doors.

In the part browser, set the library preview mode to shaded view and hit the "Model" tab. Make sure that the "Use Object's Materials" checkbox is checked. To test, Unchecking it will change the appearance of the glazed part of the door in the preview window.

Fiddle with this setting and it should correct the problem.

Hope this helps.

[David Collins]

Also, check the doors settings for options / parameters / 3d detail level.
If this is set to simple, all your doors will look like they came from Kmart.

[aahatimo]

mike,
have you checked out the dell forums?
i have found some hacked drivers there before for the same card in my 18200. dell has been know to be very slow about releasing new video drivers.
http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board?board.id=latit_video
Latitude - Video - Dell Community Forum