Hello everyone,
So I'm planning to upgrade my pc once I get some more money, but until then I'm running this monitor on an old Dell P3 600 with a RIVA TNT2 64 and Windows XP SP2.
After receiving my 2005fpw I was having trouble getting it to run in 1680x1050. It ran in 1280x960 (or something like that) right out of the box and looked pretty good even when stretched out. However, I wanted it running on the native resolution.
When I tried to update the monitor driver from the CD in the display settings I was getting an error that said something like "Can not find installer file for monitor. Contact your hardware vendor." I tried several different ways of installing the monitor driver and installed both the most recent NVIDIA drivers and the ones on the Dell CD, both of which prompted the same error notification halfway through the install. In short, nothing worked.
After snooping around on the web, I found out what was wrong. I believe it is an error related to Microsoft XP SP2. There should be a file in the c:\windows\system32 directory called "desk.cpl." This file is needed to update your monitor driver AND install the videocard drivers correctly. The post I found said that this file was found in a subdirectory c:\windows\system32\dll, but I did not have that directory on my machine. However, I did have a file called "desk.cpl_" in c:\windows\system32. I made a copy of it an renamed it to "desk.cpl". Once I did this I could update my monitor drivers which now read as "Dell 2005FPW (analog)" in the device manager. However, I still wasn't given the option to run at 1680x1050. So then I ran the .exe file in the NVIDIA directory on the Dell cd that came with the monitor. Once it finished installing, I was able to change the display to 1680x1050 in NVIDIA interface and it was reflected in the "settings" tab of the display properties window.
So now it's working and it looks great! The picture is much sharper and in the proper proportion and my xvids from bittorrent fill up a much larger portion of the screen now. It definitely runs the video a little slower and will cause me to upgrade my pc sooner than planned, but it is still well worth it. Obviously with the system I'm running games are currently out of the question, but I'm can't wait to get HL2 up in widescreen.
Hope this helps somebody out there.
So I'm planning to upgrade my pc once I get some more money, but until then I'm running this monitor on an old Dell P3 600 with a RIVA TNT2 64 and Windows XP SP2.
After receiving my 2005fpw I was having trouble getting it to run in 1680x1050. It ran in 1280x960 (or something like that) right out of the box and looked pretty good even when stretched out. However, I wanted it running on the native resolution.
When I tried to update the monitor driver from the CD in the display settings I was getting an error that said something like "Can not find installer file for monitor. Contact your hardware vendor." I tried several different ways of installing the monitor driver and installed both the most recent NVIDIA drivers and the ones on the Dell CD, both of which prompted the same error notification halfway through the install. In short, nothing worked.
After snooping around on the web, I found out what was wrong. I believe it is an error related to Microsoft XP SP2. There should be a file in the c:\windows\system32 directory called "desk.cpl." This file is needed to update your monitor driver AND install the videocard drivers correctly. The post I found said that this file was found in a subdirectory c:\windows\system32\dll, but I did not have that directory on my machine. However, I did have a file called "desk.cpl_" in c:\windows\system32. I made a copy of it an renamed it to "desk.cpl". Once I did this I could update my monitor drivers which now read as "Dell 2005FPW (analog)" in the device manager. However, I still wasn't given the option to run at 1680x1050. So then I ran the .exe file in the NVIDIA directory on the Dell cd that came with the monitor. Once it finished installing, I was able to change the display to 1680x1050 in NVIDIA interface and it was reflected in the "settings" tab of the display properties window.
So now it's working and it looks great! The picture is much sharper and in the proper proportion and my xvids from bittorrent fill up a much larger portion of the screen now. It definitely runs the video a little slower and will cause me to upgrade my pc sooner than planned, but it is still well worth it. Obviously with the system I'm running games are currently out of the question, but I'm can't wait to get HL2 up in widescreen.
Hope this helps somebody out there.