Monday 10 August 2015

Windows 10 (nearly) broke my Intel 4 Series Express graphics adapter


After an otherwise smooth transition from windows 8.1 to  Win 10 on my Dell E6400, OpenGL applications stopped working.

Stellarium relies on OpenGL
My graphics adapter apparently does not support openGL any more. It is an:
"Intel 4 series Express Chipset Family" adapter that has gone out of active support for quite a while.

After some failures, I found a surprisingly simple solution:
This Win7 driver from the Intel download center installed without any issues and brought OpenGL back at an (for this system) acceptable speed.
OpenGL is back - and so are the stars.

While a slightly newer installer (Win7Vista_64_151719.zip) refused to run on Win10, this one (Win7Vista_64_151717bb.zip) did.
I will probably have to prevent windows from updating that driver in the future.

20150824 Adendum:
The sound output of the docking station wouldn't work either. Replacong the IDT audio driver with the standard high-definition audio driver fixed that.

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