We just bought a new 32 Mb 3D Graphic Accelerator card. When we try to run a program in GL mode, after one or so minutes it freezes. We run it on a Celeron 400, with 64 Meg of SDRAM and an 8 gig hard drive. Any suggestions?

Firstly, let’s try and reduce the acceleration of your graphics card. Right-click on ‘My Computer’, located on the desktop, and click ‘Properties’ from the context menu which appears. In the window that comes up, click the ‘Performance’ tab and then click the ‘Graphics…’ button. The ‘Advanced Graphics Settings’ window will now appear. Under the ‘Graphics’ heading, note the current setting of the slider (most probably ‘Full’) and then drag the ‘Hardware acceleration’ slider down one notch. Click ‘Ok’ to close this window and then ‘Ok’ again in the other window. Try running the software with which the graphics card was having trouble to see if this resolves the problem. If it doesn’t, repeat the procedure again and again (each time moving the slider down one notch) until it does fix the problem or you reach ‘None’. If you work your way down to ‘None’ on the slider, or other side-effects start occurring, you should restore the slider to its original setting. So if you do work your way down to ‘None’ and the problem persists, the problem more than likely has something to do with OpenGL. For those who are interested, OpenGL is a programming interface used to develop 2D and 3D graphics applications (eg. such as games). Try downloading a utility called Glsetup. This will detect your type of video card and download the newest OpenGL hardware driver for the card. However, be very, very careful in doing this as it could have some nasty side effects like locking up your computer on boot. If this happens, you will need to go into Safe Mode in Windows and uninstall the drivers from there. If you are still game to give it a try, you can find the link to the utility at www.opengl.org/users/downloads/index.html.