Re: vista and VB6

"senn" <senn@homeplace&.fix> wrote in message news:uiKPOf%23iIHA.4376@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The Button is disabled. And the label tells I'm not allowed
any ajustments with the current Driver. This was wellknown
to me and I meant this included in my former post.

Right. That's exactly what I suspected. It means that you are not being given the option of turning off 2D acceleration (a standard troubleshooting method), and the reason you are not being given the option to turn it off is because it is already off, and in fact it cannot be turned on! If this is a Vista machine then that's exactly what I would expect, because Vista nobbles the card's 2D acceleration and the button is greyed out on all Vista systems (at least all Vista systems I have seen myself). But if you are saying that it is greyed out on your XP machine, and if your card does actually contain accelerated 2D hardware, then I suspect you have a driver problem because XP is usually fine in this respect. It is only Vista that nobbles it.

As not being an expert, have not reallized if this being seperated
from!. I mean, directX concerns 2D as well.

Yes. It does. Perhaps I didn't make myself very clear on that point. I used 2D and 3D and DX essentially as abbreviations to distinguish between GDI graphics functions and DX graphics functions, and I might have caused confusion by doing that. DirectX itself works very well in Vista, in fact almost as well as it works in XP. It is the standard 2D accelerated graphics through the driver that do not work in Vista. For example, with video cards that contain their own built in RAM (even the very cheapest contain quite a lot of it these days running into the hundreds of megabytes) the screen data and also the data for any screen compatible DCs you set up and the data for VB Autoredraw PictureBoxes, is normally stored in the graphic card's memory if there is sufficient graphics card memory available, not in normal system RAM. So when you want to draw a line or a box or a set of Polylines or blit an image or do one of many other things between any of those DCs using one of the standard GDI drawing or blitting functions the system checks to see whether the graphics card is capable of perfoming that specific job in its own hardware (which is usually the case) and then "tells the graphics card" what operation you wish to perform and which DCs are involved. The main processor (and of course your own VB code) then immediately comes away, leaving the code stored in the hardware in the graphics card itself to actually perform the job. This produces three results. Firstly the main processor becomes free for other uses virtually immediately, leaving the graphics card to get on with the actual job. Secondly, the operation (line or blit or whatever) is performed very much faster than it would otherwise have been performed, because the graphics card processor is a specialised processor that is designed specifically for carrying out these sort of tasks. And thirdly the amount of data that is transmitted between the main RAM and the graphics card RAM is extremely small, perhaps just a few kilobytes (or whatever) that was required to inform the graphics card of the task it was required to carry out. All in all this speeds up standard blitting and drawing graphics operations greatly on most machines. All of this stuff usually works fine in XP, but it is completely nobbled in Vista.

Anyway, for less than 14 days ago I updated the driver
to Radeon 9600.

When you say the "driver" do you mean you changed the video card to a 9600 or that you already had a 9600 fitted and you installed a new driver for it? I'm not sure which card you said you were using on your machines (one Vista and one XP).

Since this, the tray-icons has split up in 2 rows,
they're so small I hardly cannot see them. Opposite
to usual, I'm not able to alter this no matter what.

There will almost certainly be a way of altering it, but to be honest I'm not quite sure what you mean. For example, what screen pixel area (1024 x 768 or whatever) were you using before you installed the new driver, and what is it now? Also, what resolution were you using (by resolution I mean dots per inch)? Was it 96 dpi or 120 dpi or perhaps something else? And what is it now? And are there now lots more icons in the tray? New drivers tend to change lots of settings, including changing the screen resolution and all sorts of things. You need to manually change these things back after you have installed the driver if you like them the way they were before. By the way, in my own experience ATI (now AMD) have always produced drivers that do not work properly with all of their hardware. Many cards work fine on the most up to date drivers, but some do not, and I believe that some video card manufacturers (as opposed to ATI who are the video chip manufacturers and who do not make cards, or at least they never used to) create slightly modified drivers to suit certain specific requirements of the hardware that they have added. Personally I would go back to the original driver that came in the box with the video card and check out how it behaves, including running the VB code I posted as well as running the very excellent 3DMark benchmark test, and then work up slowly from there.

Mike




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