On 28 Oct 98 at 22:15, gary r. tennesen wrote:

>   Two very common and documented problems with intermittent freezing are:
> 1) Win95's graphic acceleration and many Trident video cards -- remedy: turn
> graphics acceleration down in your system settings   2) Microsoft Office's
> Find Fast, a disk/memory caching utility that causes systems to freeze --
> remedy: take Find Fast out of your Win95 start-up
>
> P.S.  I had a machine that had this problem and I replaced every component
> one-by-one (memory, video card, motherboard, etc.) none of that solved the
> problem until I turned down the graphics acceleration.

  I recently found a page which suggested this remedy -- and didn't
say anything about being specific to Trident cards.  It even claimed
that some nameless phone-answerer at Microsoft had said this wouldn't
slow things down....

  You can think of the accelerator as a second CPU dedicated to the
screen display.  The *driver* tells the Windows "GDI" component what
operations the accelerator can perform, and the slider determines to
what extent GDI will take advantage of those to unload drawing from
the main CPU.
  Technically, the MS person may have been correct, in that pixels
may reach the screen buffer just as fast if the main CPU is drawing
them rather than the accelerator -- but, like a WinModem, this steals
CPU processing from other tasks, and so there will almost certainly
be some impact on overall system performance.

  If stepping down the video acceleration fixes the problem, we have
three basic scenarios:

1.  The driver's information about functions provided by the
accelerator is incorrect.  The driver may be broken, corrupted, or
for some similar but not identical card.  Check the video card
manufacturer's web site to get the latest driver and install it in
place of what you're using.

2.  The driver correctly reports functions of the accelerator, but
its API interface to some function is buggy.  Check the video card
manufacturer's web site to get the latest driver and install it in
place of what you're using.

3.  The driver reports functions that the accelerator is supposed to
provide, but one or more of them don't actually work.  This might be
fixed by a more recent driver, or by replacement of the video card.

  My point, I guess, is that stepping down the video acceleration is
a useful diagnostic step, but a poor fix.

David G

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