Divide By Zero - a blog by Kamran Ayub

If you're like me, you bought a nice laptop so that you can game on the go. However, you soon realized that the included drivers suck horribly (in my case, Dell). Furthermore, I found out that the nVidia mobile drivers won't work with my selected video card and manufacturer. To be fair, I did upgrade the video card it came with originally to a GeForce Go 7800.

It took me a long time to find drivers that actually worked, but then I was stuck with old ForceWare 77.xx drivers instead of the new ones.

Today, I found ones that work beautifully. It's the 169.xx series which were made for desktop cards, but work perfect for my laptop, too.

For reference, I use a Dell Inspiron E1705. I downloaded the drivers from the awesome site, LaptopVideo2Go.com. You can check out their updated forums for new drivers. Here's how you install them:

1. Head to the 169.61 driver download page for XP. Depending on your OS, you might want to go to the parent forum to find the Vista drivers.
2. Download the original nVidia installation package (the "Driver" link).
3. Extract the nVidia driver to a folder.
4. Download the "Modded INF" file, and save it to where you extracted the nVidia drivers. It should ask you if you want to replace the file nv4_disp.inf and you click "Yes."
5. Install and test it out!

I was able to play Oblivion, Ultra High, at 1360x768 (my LCD TV's supported VGA resolution) with minimal slowdown. More importantly, I could use the nVidia Control Panel to add some custom resolutions. One bug I saw is that I couldn't see the text for the nav menu options in the control panel. It's okay though cause you just click them to see them. No big deal.