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In the Advanced Graphics Settings dialog box in the System Properties Performance area, you can make some changes to alleged graphics acceleration, but all is not what it seems.
WIN9X Setup attempts to identify your video card automatically by PnP if you want, but sometimes it gets it wrong. It can thus have the driver for an older version of your card loaded. Check in the Device Manager Section that you have the correct Card name specified. Also note that the Windows CD may not have the latest version of the correct driver, so you should seek it out from the manufacturer, and load it manually. It can be useful to copy it to the HD in a seperate directory, in case you experience problems with needing to reload WIN9X regularly!
Some S3 based adaptors (also known problems exist with Diamond Viper and ATI MACH 8, 32, 64 cards) will need a lower setting than the Full setting. Some adaptors conflict with the COM4 graphics port (the lights may flash on the modem when the mouse is moved or HD or network activity occurs - change the modem to another serial port), and cannot cope with the increased speed. If you experience regular inexplicable crashes with error messages such as "Explorer.exe caused a General Protection Fault in Kernel32.dll", changing to a lower acceleration speed (even none) may clear up these problems entirely. Changing the Display properties to graphics modes of 256 colours or less may also assist. Some cards (e.g. Diamond Viper or the MACH ATI) need the cards install program to correctly install them.
Full Setting of course enables everything.
Most Setting disables the hardware cursor functions. This has the same effect as SWCursor=1 in Display section of SYSTEM.INI, and also the same as loading the Real Mode Microsoft Mouse driver with /y in Autoexec.bat. This setting may be useful with some Western Digital and S3 cards.
Basic Setting adds the line MMIO=0 to the Display section of SYSTEM.INI, as well as SWCursor=1 (as above). It adds the line SafeMode=1 to WIN.INI, which enables bit-block transfers. This setting may be useful with some S3 cards.
None Setting disables all the speedups, forcing Windows to use its own functions to draw to the screen. It adds the line SafeMode=2 to WIN.INI, and also SWCursor=1 and MMIO=0 as per the Basic Setting above. You could find that this setting causes fewest problems and doesn't seem to run much slower.
While the correct drivers are the best idea, try SciTech Display Doctor, which creates a custom driver for your card. It interrogates the card, and then produces a customised driver that incorporates all the latest correct driver software to make your card use all the latest technologies, and run faster with fewer crashes.
I've put this low down in priority because while it can speed up a machine with very slow video card, I believe that the best use of the money is to increase your RAM and HD speed, and check the Card settings as above.
Buying a new card is really beyond the scope of this document, but if you have already worked through this document, and you have an old very slow AT bus 8 bit type video card (particularly if your system has been grown in steps), moving up to a cheapish style PCI bus video card with more than 1Mb of memory may have dramatic results. You will need to look at the relative technical specs of the current and proposed video cards to judge whether the cost is worth the speed increase to you. If you have an old video card, but you have upgraded everything else such as CPU (and motherboard), with lots of memory, it may be worth the new video card. Of course you have then virtually a new PC...
Thou art a WIN9X Video Optimiser in The Workshop of Life.
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