A few months back, I lost my hard drive to a virus. I had some things backed up, but not much, and it took forever to get everything updated, installed, and set up right.
But a few things are still missing. Most importantly, my computer can't find my display adapter at all. I noticed this when it won't even run ancient games like Sims 2, and even free indie titles like Iji and Eversion run painfully slow. In fact, here's a list of hardware my computer is stymied by right now:
PCI Simple Communications Controller
SM Bus Controller
Universal Serial Bus (USB) Controller
Unknown Device
Video Controller (VGA Compatible)
As far as I can tell, the "Unknown device" might be the device adapter. All of the above are listed under Other devices.
So, the first issue is how to get my computer to even recognize these things. The second is finding the relevant drivers, and sadly I don't think I can just use what came with the computer. This thing is at least five years old now, and I worry any driver disks or spec sheets got lost in the shuffle. I know the device adapter is an ATI Radeon Xpress 200 (I know, again, old computer,) and I can't even seem to find that driver on the company website among the list of other graphical adapters for XP. Just buying a whole new computer is not a financial option right now, so I'm hoping I have some way of getting all this back again. Any suggestions?
You know what? Nanowrimo's cancelled on account of the world is stupid.