Screen Saver Won't Run On Windows Vista

[Cat198 0]

Hi, I recently bought a Lenovo Thinkpad with Vista Basic installed. Originally, everything, including the screen saver, worked fine. However, after I installed Vista Ultimate Upgrade the screen saver stopped working. When I click Personalise - Screen Saver Settings it says: "The screen saver can't run because it requires a newer video card or one thats compatible with Direct3D" If I click preview screen saver it is just a black screen with the above sentence on it. If I open one of the games, like Mahjong Tiles, the following warning appears: "The gane is running in software rendering mode. Hardware acceleration is either disabled or not supported by your video card driver, which could slow game performance. Make sure you have the latest video card driver installed and that hardware acceleration is turned on" The game still runs, it is just slow. I have been in contact with Microsoft who have not been able to help. They have got me to create a new account, uninstall all nVidia applications, reinstall the drivers and nothing has worked. This is driving me insane! If anyone could suggest anything I would be very grateful! Thanks, Cat

[tansqrx 0]

The first question is how old is the laptop? Windows Vista has higher hardware requirements than XP so your hardware may not be able to run Vista. This would be the case where a Direct3D screen saver is used. Alternatively you could just pick a different screen saver that doesn’t use Direct3D.A more likely solution is you don’t have the correct video card drivers installed. Even though you upgraded, Windows usually installs a generic video card driver if it doesn’t find an exact match to yours. This basic driver will display the desktop and not much else. First check in device manager and see what the name of your video card is. Second, go to the Lenovo website (http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/) and download the latest driver (http://support.lenovo.com/ca/en?doctypeind=9&template=/productselection/landingpages/downloadsDriversLandingPage.vm&sitestyle=lenovo). If this doesn’t help, leave another message and we will give you some more suggestions.