Color quality difficulties

This morning I installed one of those microsoft updates which appear in bubbles at the bottom of the screen every so often. Well, when I restarted my computer after the installation was complete, I found that my color quality was terrible. I went to appearances menu and tried to adjust the it back to 256. But I couldn't. There is no longer an option for it. Now computer is only displaying 4 bits. What is the problem?
Joe

 

sounds like you video driver is missing/corrupt. The windows update site does do some driver updates. Goto the Hardware manager and try to update your video drivers.

 

Thank you both, abinder and PeteC, for your prompt replies. I've been fooling around for an hour or so trying to find out how first to delete my videocard driver and then reinstall it. The problem is that I don't know the name of the program or the manufacturer. So when I look under the add/remove list, I don't know which program to chose. This computer was given to me with all the program already installed. I looked under the registry to try to find out the manufacturer without luck. Do have any advice?

Pete C, I also attempted to restore my system to a previous date. But since I haven't saved the system in the past, I don't think it has anything to revert back to. Is there a way around this?

Thanks again

 

First thing to try at this point is to
- get a copy of the latest drivers for your video card and put it somewhere on the hard drive or a floppy if it will fit
- go into device manager and delete any video entries you find
- reboot and the system should notice the presence of a video card that isn't installed and try to install it.
- you should be able to force the install to use the new drivers and if so, do that. Otherwise just let it reinstall.

This will often fix the issue. If so, nothing else needed. If not, you are no worse off than now and we'll have a better idea of how to proceed.

 

drivers

To be honest, I really don't know much about video cards and drivers. I went on the microsoft webpage looking for one but I didn't really know where to begin. I found a couple of video drivers and I even downloaded one of them but not surprisingly nothing changed. Do I need to know what type of video card I have? Where can I find the drivers I need?

 

To access Device Manager, which should tell you what video card you have, go to Control Panel>System>Hardware tab>Device Manager button.

Find the entry for "Video Adapter" and click on the plus sign to its left. That will show you the name of the video card.

Then go to the manufacturer's site and find current drivers for that card or post the complete name of the card back here and someone will help you find the drivers you need.

If, however, it says "Standard VGA," which is the default video Windows uses when it can't find drivers for the card, you will need to download Everest Home Edition and run it. That will give you a lot of information about your computer, including the name of the video card.