Windows ME on Toshiba laptop - works fine, but scrolling doesn't

[Michael Dorosh]

I bought a brand new Toshiba laptop to take with me on my month's sojourn at Camp Borden; mostly for writing but with an 800 Mhz processor, figured it would be great for CM. I get CM to work fine, but the mouse doesn't seem to operate in some modes. It works fine when you are in the game itself, no problems at all, but for the scenario selection screen and the map editor, the onscreen pointer won't do what I tell it to.

Is this likely a driver problem, or are there compatibility issues with Windows ME?

[Guest ckoharik]

I use CM on my Dell laptop (Inspiron 5000e) running ME and it's worked fine for some time either using the touchpad or an external mouse.

[Schrullenhaft]

It sounds like an issue between the video driver and the mouse driver. What does the cursor look like in the scenario selection screen ? If you're lucky there may be an update to either the video or mouse driver, but most likely there isn't (even though you have a brand new laptop there is still the possibility that drivers have been updated). If it is important enough to you, then you could possibly remove the Toshiba mouse (touchpoint/touchpad) driver and instead install a Standard PS/2 Mouse driver in its place. It won't offer the features, but it should still work.

[Michael Dorosh]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Schrullenhaft:

It sounds like an issue between the video driver and the mouse driver. What does the cursor look like in the scenario selection screen ? If you're lucky there may be an update to either the video or mouse driver, but most likely there isn't (even though you have a brand new laptop there is still the possibility that drivers have been updated). If it is important enough to you, then you could possibly remove the Toshiba mouse (touchpoint/touchpad) driver and instead install a Standard PS/2 Mouse driver in its place. It won't offer the features, but it should still work.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Thanks for the replies. I am using a standard mouse rather than the touchpoint, but have not installed any new drivers. Guess that is my next step.

[Michael Dorosh]

Still having this problem, I use a standard mouse.

Very odd - the mouse works fine in the 3D world for gameplay, but when it comes to selection screens, the mouse clicks in the right place, but the screen display does not change to reflect what you clicked on, until you click on another selection.

For example, if I am in the unit editor, and I click on AXIS/ALLIED to change it to allied, the screen display freezes. Only when I click on another selection - say INFANTRY - does the screen display show what the screen should have looked like after I clicked on ALLIED.

The mouse is plugged into a PS/2 port, can I assume the correct drivers are in place?

[ December 19, 2003, 08:42 PM: Message edited by: Michael Dorosh ]

[Schrullenhaft]

It is most likely an issue with the video drivers. Does Alt-Tab (out and back into the game) refresh the screen ? A number of video cards have problems refreshing the 2D screens properly and this sound like one of those cards. Can you find any updated drivers from Toshiba ? I'd guess not since a two year old laptop is probably considered "unsupported" at this point.

If you know what the video chip is, it's possible to do some internet searches and find other laptops that may be using it. You could then download one of these, possibly newer, drivers. It's a bit of a risky proposition since 'laptop/LCD' display drivers are considered 'customized' and may vary from laptop manufacturer to laptop manufacturer.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Schrullenhaft:

It is most likely an issue with the video drivers. Does Alt-Tab (out and back into the game) refresh the screen ? A number of video cards have problems refreshing the 2D screens properly and this sound like one of those cards. Can you find any updated drivers from Toshiba ? I'd guess not since a two year old laptop is probably considered "unsupported" at this point.

If you know what the video chip is, it's possible to do some internet searches and find other laptops that may be using it. You could then download one of these, possibly newer, drivers. It's a bit of a risky proposition since 'laptop/LCD' display drivers are considered 'customized' and may vary from laptop manufacturer to laptop manufacturer.

I go into the scenario selection screen and click on a scenario I want...then I hit continue. Screen does not refresh. I hit alt-tab, and for a split second, the screen does refresh and shows me the first page of the briefing, before it escapes to the desktop.

I alt-tab to go back to CM, and the screen goes black. I can click on the next page arrow, the cancel button, etc., but they are not visible on the screen.

Weird.

[Schrullenhaft]

I've seen this before in a number of drivers for older videocards. There may be no solution (that I'm aware of). Even the newest video driver may have this same problem. If you're willing to experiment a lot and Toshiba or other sites have older drivers, you may want to try those. On occasion I've run across older drivers for a videocard that would address this problem (but possibly have others). Remember, that you use Windows 98 drivers under WinME too.

There's also a slight (and that is very slight) chance that updating your OS to Windows 2000 or XP may alleviate or get rid of this problem. However this most likely won't be a solution and could in fact cause other display problems (or compatibility issues with certain software or drivers, etc.).

What video chip and/or which particular Toshiba laptop do you have ?

[Michael Dorosh]

Thanks in advance for your advice, as always - you are nominated for Man of the Year in the GF...

The video driver is listed under control panel as

ALI Audio Accelerator WDM Driver

Processor is a Pentium® III

The machine itself is a TOSHIBA Portable Personal Computer 1800 Series

[Schrullenhaft]

Actually the "ALi Audio Accelerator" is the sound chip.

I'm not sure how much Toshiba may differentiate their US and Canadian offerings, but I'm going to assume that you have a Toshiba Satellite 1800 S2xx.

Here's the Canadian Toshiba Support page. You can select your model here and download a possibly newer video driver (v.6.60.6260-57.22.RC4, dated 6-08-2001), a newer BIOS, audio driver, AGP driver, etc.

I'm not familiar with what controls are offered for the CyberBlade video controllers, but you may want to look in the Display control panel (Settings tab > Advanced button... > look for any Trident or CyberBlade labelled/icon'd tabs or just browse through them). There may be some controls that might be worth experimenting with to see their effect on CM's 2D display refresh problem. If your laptop LCD has a configurable refresh rate (usually selected at the "Monitor" tab of the Display control panel), you may want to experiment with different settings; but it is likely that you can only use 60Hz.

Other computers with the Trident Aladdin CyberBlade Ai1 video chip are:

IBM ThinkPad R30 (machine type 2656)

Compaq Armada 110

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Schrullenhaft:

Actually the "ALi Audio Accelerator" is the sound chip.

yeah, yeah - that's the only thing that was listed under "video and audio drivers"

Thanks for the rest, though. I'm not too terribly put out about this since my PC is only temporarily down - but get this. I phone the bastards who are working on the PC's hard drive today.

I bought the thing from a computer store in Calgary, and took it back last spring, about a year after purchase, with sounds coming from inside the case - grinding sounds. They keep the thing for FOUR WEEKS, tell me it is the chipset fan, and replace same. It sits there another week until I phone them, and they say "yeah, it's been ready for a week." Uh...any reason you didn't phone me? "oh, sorry, we forgot."

No problem.

Grinding noises still there a week after getting it home, but I ignore it thinking it is just the computer overheating. I shut down some applications, turn off for awhile each night, it *seems* to go away temporarily.

So a month ago, this sound is getting worse and worse, and finally it is causing lockups. I take it in, and they say it is the hard drive. Needs to be replaced. Must get parts from the manufacturer. Waiting now for 4 weeks again.

But this is what has me genuinely worried.

When I take the thing in, they look at me and say that the serial number on the machine doesn't match their records. Well, I bought the machine in that very store (my laptop too, and the PC before this one - pretty good customer, I am) and the only place I've taken it in for repairs is that very store.

So what's the deal? Am I being accused of stealing the computer? Am I being accused of voiding the warranty with unauthorized repairs? Is this their way of weaseling out of paying for the repairs? Sounds very fishy to me. It bugs me that my warranty only covers "x" number of months, but they have had the PC in their clutches for two solid months during the life of that warranty. Can I demand the warranty be extended by that long?

[Michael Dorosh]

Oh, incidentally, I am running my laptop connected to the desktop's physical monitor while the PC is in the shop. Would the monitor setting inside the laptop effect the refresh rates of the monitor?

I am a dunce with this stuff so I hope that isn't a ridiculous question.

EDIT - in any event, I did download the latest driver from the Toshiba site, and it had no effect (I rebooted to let the new setup take effect).

Given that my memory is so low that the first scenario design I tried to do resulted in completely white landscape DOH I suppose this is rapidly becoming a non-issue.

Thanks for the help; I can still play smaller scenarios on the laptop, and if it turns out the rip off artists are going to keep my computer for a while (or as evidence in the assault trial I am envisioning for myself if I have to put up with their crap for much longer), I may need to keep working on this...

[ December 20, 2003, 06:56 PM: Message edited by: Michael Dorosh ]

[Biff]

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

I bought a brand new Toshiba laptop to take with me on my month's sojourn at Camp Borden; mostly for writing but with an 800 Mhz processor, figured it would be great for CM. I get CM to work fine, but the mouse doesn't seem to operate in some modes. It works fine when you are in the game itself, no problems at all, but for the scenario selection screen and the map editor, the onscreen pointer won't do what I tell it to.

Is this likely a driver problem, or are there compatibility issues with Windows ME?

I've got a Toshiba Satellite laptop with Nvidia geforce2go chipset. I've never had a problem with the mouse but I can say without a doubt that WinME is horrible. I replaced it with Win2000 and it is much, much better and more stable.

The other problem I had was getting a current video driver from Toshiba. They rarely update their drivers and Nvidia doesn't support the geforce2go chipset in their driver updates.

[Schrullenhaft]

Do you know if the internal/LCD display is disabled while you're running an external monitor ? Are the two displays "mirrored" (i.e. - exact same content on each screen) ?

The refresh rate specified in the Display control panel (as listed above) will affect the refresh rate of the monitor. Depending on the CyberBlade's capabilities, the displays may have to have the same resolution and refresh rate or you may be able to set them independent of each other. If the latter is the case, then you'll want to see if you can disable the internal display since this will eat up more video memory. Disabling the "internal display" may require changing something in the CMOS/BIOS setup or in a Toshiba utility (if it is available).

The CyberBlade Ai1 is also a 'shared memory' display device, so a low amount of system memory is really going to affect what you can run.

Again, you may want to check out what settings you can change (Display control panel > Advanced... button > various tabs). Something might help here.

As for that computer shop you've been dealing with... that's annoying. Apparently having computers around hasn't really made running their business any better. Definitely hang onto any receipts you get from them for warranty purposes later. Most stores should have a problem arguing with their own receipts. Of course this suggestion may not help you with your current quandry.