I recently reformatted the hard drive on my computer (PII 300) and after reloading Windows 98 and other software including the Diamond Monster II video accelerator driver I am stuck with 16 colours at 640 x 480 resolution. The system has loaded a Standard VGA display adapter which I can’t seem to change. I have loaded updated drivers for my monitor (Acer76c) and the Diamond Monster II card but it makes no difference. I had a look in ‘msconfig’ but the ‘VGA 640 x 480′ box was not ticked. The system worked perfectly before reformatting the hard drive.

It is strange that the installation of your Diamond Monster II drivers didn’t override the Standard VGA display adapter drivers. However, we should be able to change this. Try the following procedure to install the drivers for your video card over the Standard VGA display adapter drivers. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Settings’ > ‘Control Panel’, open the ‘System’ control panel, and click the ‘Device Manager’ tab. Find the reference to the ‘Standard VGA display’ (which could be under ‘Display adapters’, ‘Other devices’ or ‘Sound, Video, and Game controllers’) and double click on the reference. In the window that opens, click the ‘Driver’ tab and then the ‘Change driver’ button. You should now see a wizard that will guide you through the installation of your video drivers. In the wizard, you will be prompted to either search for a driver for your device or to display a list of drivers in a specific location. When you see this page of the wizard, select the ‘Display a list of drivers in a specific location’ option. The next window should display a list of manufactures and drivers. In this window, click the button labelled ‘Have Disk…’. Place your drivers disk or CD in the drive and then click the ‘Browse…’ button in the ‘Install from disk’ window. Now comes the tricky part. You will need to navigate to the directory on the disk that has the INF file for your model of video card (the INF file contains the necessary installation information for the drivers of your video card). You will need to have a search through the directories on the CD to locate the INF file. Then select the INF file and click ‘Ok’ and then ‘Ok’ again in the ‘Install from disk’ window. Now the ‘Select Device’ window will appear, with the drivers for the devices contained in that INF file. Select the device you have (ie. Diamond Monster II) and click ‘Ok’.. The drivers will now install. If you are prompted to install the DirectX drivers, point to the same location as you did for the video card drivers. If your model of video card is not displayed, you probably have selected the wrong INF file. In this case, click the ‘Have Disk…’ button again and look for another INF file. If you cannot find an INF file for your video driver, download the latest drivers from www.diamondmm.com/default.asp?menu=support&submenu=Legacy_Graphics&item=drivers&product=Monster_3D_II . When you run the EXE, in which the drivers are contained, this will start an automated setup. Let this run and see if it will install correctly. If this doesn’t work, then re-run the EXE but tick ‘Expand installation files only’. This will extract the installation files but not run the setup. At this point you need to repeat the procedure for manually installing the video card drivers (as described above). However, when you click ‘Have Disk…’ instead of navigating to a disk/CD with the drivers, navigate to the directory on your hard drive to where the downloaded drivers extracted. I have downloaded the drivers and had a look at them and while there is a INF file (MNSTR2.INF), when I tried to install the drivers I received an error message. This may be because I am running Windows 2000 and don’t have a Diamond Monster video card. Give it a go and if it doesn’t work then please contact me again.