Troubleshooting System Crashes Via the Graphics Hardware Acceleration Setting

Investigating the acceleration setting Determining the system's acceleration setting is easy once you know where to find it. To begin, launch Control Panel and double-click the System icon (or right-click My Computer and select Properties from the shortcut menu). When you see the System properties sheet, select the Performance tab and then click the Graphics... button. In a moment, you'll see the Advanced Graphics Settings dialog box, shown in Figure A.

Figure A: You'll adjust the graphics hardware acceleration setting in the Advanced Graphics Settings dialog box.

As you can see, Windows 95 by default sets the Hardware Acceleration slider to Full. When the system uses this setting, Windows 95 enables all its graphics hardware acceleration features. This means that Windows 95 depends on the display adapter to handle the majority of the graphical operations and sends information pertaining to those operations to the display adapter as fast as it can. If your graphics hardware has trouble receiving information at such high rates of speed or is incapable of performing the operations Windows 95 expects, the system will frequently lock up or crash.

There are three reasons why the graphics hardware may have difficulties using the Full graphics hardware acceleration setting. First, Windows 95 may have misidentified the display adapter or monitor during the installation procedure. If so, Windows 95 isn't using the proper drivers to communicate with your devices. Second, the version of display driver the system is using may be outdated. Many graphics hardware manufacturers have improved their drivers and released updated versions that perform more efficiently than the older versions. Third, the display adapter may be an older, less sophisticated model. If that's the case, it simply may not be able to handle the Full graphics hardware acceleration setting.

Regardless of the cause, you'll want to begin your troubleshooting expedition by making sure that you've installed the correct and most recent graphics hardware drivers available. If Windows 95 misidentified your display adapter or monitor during the installation procedure and you later install the most current drivers, you should use the system for a few days before adjusting the graphics acceleration setting. You may have solved the problem with the new drivers and will be able to safely and reliably use the Full graphics hardware acceleration setting. For more detailed information on identifying and obtaining graphics hardware drivers, see the article " Investigating the Graphics Hardware Drivers." Adjusting the setting If you continue to have problems or if you discover that your display adapter is an older model, you'll want to adjust the graphics hardware acceleration setting to an appropriate level. As you can see in Figure A, the Hardware Acceleration slider has four notches. The notches from left to right correspond to None, Basic, Most, and Full. Moving the slider to the left gradually disables Windows 95's graphics acceleration features and helps eliminate system crashes caused by graphics operations. To adjust the setting, access the Advanced Graphics Settings dialog box as we described earlier. Then, move the slider down a notch, click OK to close the dialog box, and click Close to dismiss the System properties sheet. When the System Settings Change dialog box prompts you to restart your system, as shown in Figure B, click Yes.

Figure B: When you change the graphics hardware acceleration setting, you'll need to restart your system.

To determine if it was the graphics hardware acceleration setting that was causing your system to unexplainably lock up or crash, we recommend moving the Hardware Acceleration slider down only one notch, using your system for a few days, and seeing if the change eliminates the system crashes. If your PC crashes again, return to the Advanced Graphics Settings dialog box and move the Hardware Acceleration slider down another notch.

For example, on one of our test systems, moving the slider from Full to Most didn't solve the problem. However, when we later moved it to Basic, the unexplainable system crashes went away. Furthermore, this change didn't noticeably degrade our graphics performance. In fact, we discovered that Windows 95 performed some actions, such as minimizing and maximizing windows, more quickly than before. What it does As we mentioned, when the system is using the Full acceleration setting, Windows 95 enables all its graphics hardware acceleration features and depends on the display adapter to handle the majority of graphical operations. Furthermore, Windows 95 sends information pertaining to those operations to the display adapter at a high speed. When you move the slider to the Most setting, Windows 95 still enables most of the acceleration functions, but it disables your graphics card's ability to display the mouse pointer as it moves across the screen. Windows 95 then takes over the job of displaying the mouse pointer, thus removing one of the most consistent graphical operations performed.

If you move the slider to the Basic setting, Windows 95 uses minimal graphics acceleration. It also limits the amount of screen patterns that the display adapter can manipulate at one time and disables memory-mapped input/output for some display drivers. Of course, when you move the slider to the None setting, Windows 95 disables all the acceleration support and manipulates all the onscreen graphic elements using its own functions rather than relying on those provided by the graphics display driver.

Conclusion

If your system frequently locks up for no apparent reason and displays the message Explorer.exe caused a General Protection Fault in Kernel32.dll or a similar error message, your system may have an improperly configured graphics hardware acceleration setting. In this article, we've shown you how to troubleshoot problems caused by this setting.