Poor video quality on old ThinkPad 390X Options

[Relztrah]

A friend gave me her old ThinkPad 390X w/ Pentium II chip and 64MB of
RAM. I wanted to make sure there was no viruses, spyware or personal
data on it so the first thing I did is to run fdisk, delete and
recreate the partition, format the hard drive, and reinstall Windows.
I installed Win98 SE and upgraded to WinME.

Then I logged on to the IBM website and downloaded everything that
looked like I might need it including a BIOS update. I also downloaded
and installed whatever video drivers I could find.

But even after all that the video is terrible. It looks like when you
start in Safe Mode only worse. Colors are off, icons blurry, etc. I
know there's a correct video driver out there somewhere because it
didn't look nearly this bad when she first gave it to me. I kinda
regret reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows. But I
felt that was the right thing to do. How do I get a good image back?

Thanks,
Relztrah

[Uncle Jesse]

Hello and thanks for the question.

<_< Why didn't you just do a clean install of ME in the first place?

:D Heres a link to scan your drivers and see if a better one is available...Driver scan

Assuming that you can get online with that PC.... The link is free, though, in order to download the drivers you have to pay to join the site... Read the fine print. As many machines as I update each year it worth it to me to llep my clients get the drivers they need and fast!. Hope this helps... UJ

[Relztrah]

Why didn't you just do a clean install of ME in the first place?

I don't have a complete ME CD, only an upgrade CD. So after doing a clean install of 98SE I upgraded to ME mainly for the drivers ME has. I really don't think there's that much difference between them other than the drivers contained in ME.

But it's a moot point now because in my desperation with this "StinkPad" I searched through the case and found a System Recovery CD. Aha! And in fact after running it my video is fine...well as good as it's going to be on this jalopy. I'm just going to leave well enough alone and work with Win98SE for the time being. (Oh, yes. I found a fellow selling 64MB of RAM for this thing on eBay which I grabbed. So now I'm smokin' with a whopping 128MB of RAM!)

Thanks for your help.

[Uncle Jesse]

Hey Cool :D you found the restore CD. I take it you didnt check out the driver site I mentioned... Its ok, enjoy 98 while you can there aren't any more OS updates for it. Thanks for the reply! UJ