When I was requesting for a inspection at my Laptop hardware specs, I have noticed that this was from a Windows Vista era (more specifically, it had no SP1 yet), so I decided to ask Ray for some inspection and they said no way that would run Windows Vista well, but Windows XP would do the trick. So, to be sure to be using Windows XP instead of Bodhi Linux (on which Celeron M has been officially tested), I asked at r/windowsxp if it would be capable of running without any flaws. In one of the comments, they said that my LAPTOP is likely to run 2001-Older games, and gave a youtube video that explains why.
Onto the YT comments, I saw 2 different people talking about “Modified Drivers for GMA950” that tend to optimize the graphics card for better performance (although won’t do the “magic”lol).
Now, by looking at the perspective, it sounds like a real thing, but it is like an unsafe play.
Remember that the GMA950 is an old discontinued GPU, and that’s why there are Modified Drivers on the internet, and even has some discussions about it.
is it actually worth it to take the risk and get those drivers or should I, instead, get the normal/original drivers? If have anyone tried these drivers, what was the experience on it + did the Antivirus detected anything suspicious on the files?
Long ago, I bought an Atom reference board which uses the GMA 950, and even when it was new, the performance was very much lacking. It also has very limited video codec support, which a few years later, was a huge problem (although CoreAVC helped). But this is the first I heard there were any modded drivers, so I never had the opportunity to try them.
Virus-wise, I think the risk here is minimal, just because of what these drivers are for, and of course you could always send them to VirusTotal for a second opinion. Personally, I’d be more concerned about what these drivers actually do with the hardware, as I imagine the modification is some sort of overclocking, maybe by removing checks or bypassing restrictions that prevented it from getting too hot. I’m not sure if the small performance enhancement would be worth the risk of breaking the hardware.
Somewhat related, I was using modded drivers for the GMA 4500MHD in my Thinkpad X200 Tablet during the Windows 8 era. It came with Vista and worked fine in Windows 7, but the driver would refuse to load on 8. I don’t recall the specifics, but someone fixed this somehow, and released a driver that allowed it to load successfully (and worked fine otherwise). On Windows 10, the driver is built-in to the OS and works fine without doing anything. Although to get the included WiFi Link 5300 card to work on 5Ghz and the notification light to operate, the Dell version of the driver is needed.
Maybe the modified drivers should be scanneable on VirusTotal then (after extracting from MSI for example), because generally, old drivers are a bunch of files that can be obtained upon extracting by a tool or 7-Zip itself (then I zip it and check). Maybe the installer verification is also a good deal (although I remember I have installed the Open-Source Foobar2000 v1.5.11, but from 3 of these antiviruses, 2 of them were using an AI and the other one might be false positive) [I might talk about these AI virus detection at a separate thread tomorrow when possible]
EDIT: It seems like AIs on Antiviruses are actually a good deal, when it’s not entirely just AI