Can anyone help with an old hardware problem?

[Kylotan]

I just posted this on the forum at Matrox.com, but a friend suggested I ask here too, just in case someone could help. I understand that the hardware listed is a bit aged now! But upgrading isn't an option just yet.

My old Matrox Mystique was working fine with the standard Windows 98 SE drivers, but I thought I would install the latest ones from your site. The main reason for doing this was because I thought it might solve the problem of stuttering sound when playing sound and scrolling documents simultaneously.
Windows warned that I might be overwriting a newer driver, but I ignored this as I assumed the proper Matrox driver would be better.

However, now I've done this, I get very serious problems. When I scroll down to the bottom of most emails in Outlook Express, the display goes black, the monitor light flashes as if it's receiving zero signal, and caps lock no longer responds (for what it's worth). Mainly it's when I use the mousewheel, but not always. It seems to be linked to the html rendering, since that is the common graphical component in IE and OE, but who knows.

Everything installed properly, as far as I can tell. There are no visible conflicts in Device Manager.

If there's no other obvious thing to fix, can I just restore the Win98SE drivers somehow? Simply removing the card and letting Windows redetect it didn't fix the problem.

Details: Matrox Mystique, 1064SG, 4mb, SGRAM LVTTL 8 Mbits, 170 MHz, s/n EAC78121. PD 4.12.013. MGA Bios: no idea. Motherboard is 82430TX, Cyrix 233 MX II, Win98 SE, 1024x768x16bpp, DirectX 6, Several hard drives (UDMA not on), Sonic Impact s90 sound card, ADI Microscan monitor, card uses IRQ 10 (shared with PCI steering).

[SteveC]

Not sure what the weird crashing you're seeing is all about, but to remove the matrox drivers should be easier. Firstly, is there an add/remove programs entry? (I can't remember if those old drivers did have that in control panel). Secondly, have you tried the Matrox uninstaller from their website?

If the above fails (which is may as they are for their newer drivers, then simply boot up in safe mode, remove the entry in device manager for the graphics card, then delete any mga*.* files in your WINDOWS directory, especially WINDOWS\INF\OTHER.

Then reboot normally and the card should be redetected using the standard windows drivers.

[Kylotan]

Hi Steve. I got a similar suggestion from someone else regarding forcing Windows to find the old drivers, so thanks for that. I also downloaded the uninstaller program, which I will try first. I am going to give it another 12hrs or so to see if anyone can give me a way of fixing the new drivers rather than removing them, but if no-one has been able to help at that point I will just try to revert to the old ones. Thanks for your help.

(PS. For the benefit of anyone else reading this thread who might be able to help, I just discovered my BIOS is v1.8, for what it's worth.)

[kjliew]

I still have a Matrox Mystique 170 running with my Abit TX5 430TX-based mobo with Win98SE and Win2K. I have never had any problem with 4.12 driver. BTW, I am using 5.13 driver in Win98SE. Look into Matrox drivers archives, the W9x Powedesk 5.13 actually has unified driver for all pre G-series Matrox cards. My system uses SB AWE32 soundcard. It's a great card, although ISA will be a history soon.

Perhaps you want to try your luck with 5.13, too. The drivers comes with W9X are never as good as the ones from Matrox.

[Kylotan]

Well, I'm sure there's lots of people who don't have problems with the drivers I've used them before on a different installation and they were fine. But right now, there appears to be something wrong with them, since disabling hardware acceleration appears to have fixed the system-hang problem.

What's this 5.13 you speak of? According to their site, the 4.12 which I have is the latest unified driver for the old cards...?

[kjliew]

PD5.13 was never meant to be used with any pre G-series Matrox cards. But it just happened to support them. It's unofficial, and Matrox doesn't support that. No known improvement, except the new PD5 interface.

Disabling hardware acceleration or bus mastering is not a solution for system stability. You lose a great deal of performance if either or both disabled. Try to look somewhere else for the cause of your problem.

[Kylotan]

Well, at the moment, I've just reverted to the old drivers, which are ok. I just would have liked to have known what was wrong with the 'official' set.