I have an HP Pavillion computer running Vista Home Basic 64bit and I just now swapped graphics cards with my dad, this graphics card is running through a PCI express slot I believe. And I boot my computer with it in and it defaults to the onboard graphics. And when I go to device manager it just says "Standard VGA Graphics Adapter" under "Display Adapters" and my moniter is plugged into the graphics card. Not the onboard one. And it confuses me because I'm getting picture form the PCI graphics card but when I try to play World of Warcraft it says it can't find a suitable graphics card. And that makes me know that it's running with onboard because this card has played WoW before. Anyway I guess I just need to install drivers for it but.. I honestly don't know what kind of graphics card it is. I know it's an Nvidia GeForce. I think it's an 8500 but I'm not sure. I don't want to have to pay for a driver search tool like Driver Detective. Any ideas? Any help is appreciated thanks.
Go to NVIDIA web site and see if they have a driver check tool that automatically checks what card you have.
The reason you are getting a generic adapter ISN'T because of the onboard graphics, its off, its because you have no drivers installed for your card. Windows always gives you the basic driver to run any video-card at start-up.
Oh and if you are unsure that it is 8800 but think it is try installing the driver anyway. It will usually say not right one if its not. But all the drivers are supported by it. If you reboot and no pic or ir doen't show the card in DXDIAG (type that in at run).That will take you to a window that shows you your card and sound card and anything that certified for windows. If it doesn't work then boot and press f8 and boot into last known good configuration or uninstall drivers in safe mode and check another driver. But it should work
