Turn Off Hardware Acceleration to Improve Video Quality

Turn Off Hardware Acceleration to Improve Video Quality
Today, almost all software applications use multimedia including graphics, audio, video, animation and text to make using the PC an enjoyable experience. This directly translates into a surge in demand for processing power, leading to the manufacture of powerful video and graphic cards. The Hardware Acceleration tab allows you to specify the performance of the graphics hardware present on your PC.

All applications have different hardware acceleration requirements, depending on the task they are meant to perform. Problems due to improper hardware acceleration settings include - mouse pointer problems, corrupt images, problems while working with or converting videos in MPEG and DVR – MS formats, issues in playing video files in different media players and display problems with graphics in games. The symptoms include jerky videos and applications running slowly or failing to run at all. This problem is especially common in older PC's.
Turning off the hardware acceleration system wide in Windows XP
You can turn off hardware acceleration completely or turn it down system wide in the following manner:

1. Click on Start > Control Panel.
2. In the classic view, double click on the Display icon.
3. Select the Settings tab and click on the Advanced button. The Advanced Settings dialog box appears.























4. Click on the Troubleshoot tab.

5. You can disable the hardware acceleration completely by dragging the slider to the extreme left of the scale. You can also choose to turn down the hardware acceleration by selecting an intermediate value.

If the issue is resolved with hardware acceleration turned off, the source of the problem could be old video drivers for your video adapter. In that case, you need to contact the manufacturer of your video card to get the latest drivers.

If you have installed the latest video driver for your video adapter and you continue to experience graphic issues with the Graphics Hardware Acceleration slider set to ‘Full’, try experimenting by reducing the acceleration by one notch and checking the results.

HOW TO CREATE BOOT DISK

Creating a Windows XP boot disk
Note: The Microsoft Windows XP CD is a bootable CD and in many cases you should not need a bootable floppy diskette. Booting from the Windows XP CD will allow you to not only install/re-install Windows XP but will also allow you to troubleshoot it.
Create MS-DOS bootable diskette
When formatting a floppy diskette, users have the option of creating a MS-DOS startup disk, follow the below steps to do this.
Place diskette in the computer.
Open My Computer, right-click the A: drive and click Format.
In the Format window, check Create an MS-DOS startup disk.
Click Start
Create Windows XP Setup diskettes
Microsoft is beginning to phase out bootable floppy diskettes in favor of bootable CD discs and has not included a method of easily creating a bootable floppy diskette in Windows XP or from the CD. However, Microsoft has downloads available for users who still need to create bootable diskettes to install (not upgrade) Windows XP. These downloads can be found through KB310994.
Additional help and information about troubleshooting bootable CDs not booting is found on document CH000217.