Fixing OpenGL on my HP TC1100
Posted on February 17, 2006
I’ve been having a bit of a problem getting OpenGL (in particular, second life) working on my HP TC1100 tablet. It used to work, but recently when I attempted anything that wanted to use OpenGL it would report “can’t create gl rendering context”.
I tried uninstalling my video drivers, and updating them from HP’s website but that didn’t fix the problem. My graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go 32M, so I went to NVIDIA’s website, but it appears they basically leave it up to the OEM to supply the drivers.
Anyway, long story shorter, this usenet post (which I found by searching Google Groups for “NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go opengl“) pointed me to Omega Drivers who describe themselves (himself) thusly:
The purpose of the Omega Drivers is to provide gamers with an alternate set of drivers, ones that have more options and features than the original sets. The drivers contain optimizations, extra features (like OC capabilities), more resolutions and internal tweaks that can give them the edge in a gaming environment over the normal drivers, which are often tailored for synthetic benchmarks.
They have custom drivers for ATI Radeon, NVidia GeForce, and 3DFX video cards in most windows flavours, so if you are having trouble with an OEM supplied driver like I did, you may get better results giving them a go.
UPDATE: Unfortunately the Omega NVidia drivers didn’t support screen rotation, which is more important to me than being able to use OpenGL, so I have moved back to the crappy HP-supplied drivers.
UPDATE II: Turns out it was MATLAB’s fault.
» Filed Under computer, opengl, tablet
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[...] So a whilish back I was complaining about OpenGL not working properly on my HP TC1100 Tablet, and I never ended up solving it. Turns out it was MATLAB causing the problem, and you need to disable the MATLAB Server service from running (Why the hell was it running by default anyway). Details here. [...]
Hi,
I found your blog when searching in google for:
“Can’t create GL rendering context secondlife”
I have the same problem you used to have ( or that is what i understood…), when I start secondlife a window appears with the following message Error: “Can’t create GL rendering context” and then it closes secondlife….
I read your post but, sincerely the pc-talking makes me dizzy. I think it has something to do with the video card, how do i find out what is my video card??
Well any help for this addicted player will be appreaciated.Thanks
Ramon, to find what your video card is in XP, right click on your desktop then select ‘Properties’. Go to the ‘Settings’ tab. On my setup I can see ‘1. Plug and Play Monitor on NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go 32M’, so my video card is ‘NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go 32M’. You can also get more details on your video card my clicking ‘Advanced’ on the settings tab, and then looking at the ‘Adaptor’ tab in the new window.
Once you’ve worked out what you have, you may be able to try the OMEGA drivers. But be aware that they are not supported by your hardware manufacturer, so use at your own risk.