I have a Pentium II with Windows 98. Recently Windows no longer displays in 256 colours and has reverted to 16 colours mode. I cannot get any good images and my kids can’t play most of the games. When I change the setting in the ‘Display’ control panel from ‘16 Colours’ to ‘256 Colours’ a message appears prompting me to reboot the machine. However, after the system reboots it is still in 16 colour mode. I’ve checked the connection of the video card and it is not loose. The adapter driver installed is ‘RAGE IIc AGP (English)’ and the monitor driver is ‘HP D5258A Pavilion M50 Monitor’. Is there anyway to fix the problem?

Firstly, try increasing the resolution as well as the colours. You can do this by moving the slider next to the colour selection in the ‘Settings’ area of the ‘Display’ control panel. I suggest that you move the resolution slider to 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768. However, this is very dependant on what your monitor can support. Once you have changed the colours and resolution, restart your computer.

If this doesn’t work, or you cannot change the resolution, it may be that somehow the option in the Microsoft System Configuration Utility (msconfig) to force the computer to run at 640 x 480 x 16 is enabled. To check if this has been enabled, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘msconfig’ (without the quotes) and then click on the ‘Ok’ button. In the window that appears, click the ‘Advanced’ button on the ‘General’ tab. Make sure that the option for ‘VGA 640 x 480 x 16′ is not enabled. If it is, disable it. Now see if you can change the colour depth and make it stick.

Finally, I have one last suggestion for you, albeit, it is a bit risky. The idea is to try to remove the video driver and monitor driver you currently have installed, to force Windows to recognise your display adapter and monitor on startup and reinstall them with either new drivers or reinstall your old drivers. This procedure should be safe enough as you can not really go much lower in terms of the display quality which you presently have. If you wish to try this, firstly make sure that you have your video driver disk and monitor driver disk on hand in case they are needed. Then boot your computer up into Safe Mode by restarting, press the F8 key when the ‘Starting Windows 98…’ message appears, and then select and enter ‘Safe Mode’ from the startup menu. When the computer has booted, go to the ‘Control Panel’ > ‘System’ control panel and, in the window that appears, click the ‘Device Manager’ tab and enable ‘View device by type’. Expand ‘Display Adapters’ and click on your display adapter device, then press the ‘Remove’ button. Now expand ‘Monitors’ and remove your monitor device through the same procedure. Click ‘Ok’ to close the device manager and restart your computer. When your computer starts, you should be asked to install your video driver and monitor driver. Let Windows try to install the driver for the devices itself. However, if it cannot, I suggest you install your original drivers again. Once the installation has been completed (you may need to restart your computer), go back into the display settings and see if you can change the settings. Please let me know how this turns out.