Camera and Mouse Issues on an older Computer

anne.dumka_58cfa13a2a

Life was wonderful and I had no problem running all my 3D graphics programs, and Second Life on my antique PC (Vista, Home version + NVIDIA GeForce Video) until about a year ago when Microsoft downloaded an update at me. Suddenly, my mouse refused to drive cameras in nearly all my programs: no "mouselook" in Second Life (okay, I can manage without it), hiccups in Hexagon (there's a work-around), and no camera at all in Bryce. DS works okay, and I haven't had the heart to try Poser.

The mouse has no difficulty with standard point and click, or drag and drop functions, just with working in the 3D environment.

I wonder if anyone else has experienced this and/or if anyone can give me a clue where to look to try to fix this. I'm tired of phutzing around and having expensive software I can't use.

Can you help?

 

Roman_K2

Not sure about your specific problem but sadly, I'm very familiar with Vista generally going haywire. Worse, one or two annoying things about it successfully made the jump to Win7, arrrgh. What can I say; always follow whatever backup protocol the manufacturer recommends - like the recovery discs or whatever they want you to do. It may seem like overkill (some brands load you down with garbageware right from the get-go, right out of the box, other times you'll have the drive re-imaged and that person may thoughtfully include lots of new garbage on your 'new' drive) but odds are you may find yourself wanting to return to factory condition -- it's hard to see down the road.

I'm getting a sense that you would like a non-destructive fix for your Vista OS... ask whoever is going to do this work to FIRST give you recovery discs to get your system back to exactly the way it is today, should their proposed work fail.

In my case I ended up having a troublesome Vista machine reimaged by a local shop without issue for about $125 including a new hard drive, and then I had the luxury of setting the entire computer aside... thinking back, I do seem to remember the manufacturer recommending a "new NVIDIA suite" and I did download it that and I wasn't impressed/things did not get better... the good news is that for me, exiting Vista at least for the time being meant DS and Hexagon work much better on a newer, Win7 machine. Also when you get to the point of re-imaging you'll be surprised to find out how many people either have working, generic images in their toolkit or on their server and you or someone a bit more knowledgeable can just download them and use them.

 Roman

Other notes: Vista came out at a point in time when backup protocols changed... Microsoft started jigging theirs, Symantec took "Norton Ghost" off the market, other things happened. As I mentioned running the new backup routines (and I have done it with different manufacturers, of hardware for Win7) isn't a lot of fun.

More notes (yikes!!) - in researching this post I discovered that a version of Ghost is still available from Symantec. [Wikipedia English link] I didn't know that and I wonder how many Ghost 14 purchasers are in the dark... in my case most of my original Vista stuff is stored as .GHO files, hmmm. The byzantine ins and outs of Backup and Recovery begininng with Vista is mentioned here on Wikipedia English.