Just yesterday my customer encountered a problem where his computer wasn’t able to boot in Windows. It just got to the point where it loading Windows with the bar and then the screen is blank. However, there’s no problem in booting into Safe Mode. My guess is if you’re able to boot in Safe Mode but not in Windows, chances are the drivers might be corrupted. I uninstalled the display driver from Safe Mode. True enough, I am able to boot in to normal Windows but without display driver. So everything looks big with the 640 x 480 resolution.
Download video card driver
Now I need to download the latest display driver to install on to the computer. I asked my customer whether he has any idea what video card is on his computer and he didn’t had a clue. I can use a CD or USB flash drive that contains utility that can automatically detect the video card on that computer. There’s another method on how you can manually detect what video card you have by using the built-in Windows debug tool.

Before we start, I’d like you to remember not to include the double quotes when typing commands. Open up the DOS command prompt by clicking on “Run” in the START menu, and type “cmd” in the dialog window.

Type “debug” on the command line. This will start the debug prompt, indicated by the – at the beginnning of each line.

Now type: “d c000:0000“, and press Enter. There are some tutorial will suggest you to type “d c000:0010″ or “d c000:0040″ and etc… Either one will work but I prefer the 0000 because it’s the starting point and you won’t miss out any information. If the first shown contents doesn’t display any useful information, you can always type “d” and press enter to show the next content. To quit the debugger, just type “q“, press enter and you’re back in your DOS command prompt.

Now the debugger will show the contents of the address after typing the “d c000:0000″ command. You might have to take a look at the two or three next addresses to see some information about your video card. At the image below, you can see the commands being used at the yellow colored box.
How to detect video card

Here’s a close up shot at the important information. As you can see, it’s written GeForce 6200.
Detect graphic card installed

I can say that this method works 80% of the time. Some graphic card such as Intel Extreme doesn’t display information when you debug the address above. On my Acer laptop, I have a ATI Mobility Radeon X700 but I could only find ATI information on the address and not the model. I would consider this the secondary method to detect video card if somehow I couldn’t use hardware information utility on that computer.

[tags]debug, video card, display adapter, graphics card, gpu, nvidia, ati[/tags]