STEP 1

Make sure you unistall video drivers that do not work. If you see exclamation marks on your previous drivers in Device Manager, unistall them. Your Device Manager should say that you have Standard VGA Driver installed under Display category and exclamation mark on “video controller”. Make sure you restart PC when asked.

STEP 2

We will need to edit “c:\windows\system32\drivers\vgapnp.sys” file now, but there is a problem. Windows Vista and Windows 7 will NOT allow you to edit system files even when you are the admin. Changing security attributes of that file did not work either. The file is owned by “TrustedInstaller” service. We will need to own the file and give ourselves the full control to edit it.
Click ‘Start’ and in ‘Search’ type ‘cmd’. The result will show on top. Right-click on ‘cmd’ and choose “Run as Administrator”. If your account does not have admin rights you might be prompted to enter username and password. I used account that already has administrator priviledges. You should have a command prompt with administrator priviledges.

STEP 3

Lets say my logged in username is peter

First command you do is:

takeown /f c:\windows\system32\drivers\vgapnp.sys

This will give ownship to the current user. You should see a message saying SUCCESS etc..

Second command you do is:

cacls c:\windows\system32\drivers\vgapnp.sys /G peter:F

There will be a confirmation message so type ‘y’. This will change the security attributes to give you ONLY all the permissions for the file. If you are paranoid as me and want original permissions restored, I will show you how to restore the permissions to the previous step later on in this tutorial . If ‘cacls’ command does not work you can try using ‘icacls’. If you cannot edit this file try to boot to “Save Mode” and try it again (Thx to Giuseppe Chill).

STEP 4

Open c:\windows\system32\drivers\vgapnp.sys in any text editor. Just add any character to the begining of the text. Let’s say we will add character x . So the text should start with xMZ and the rest of stuff. Save the file. This edit will render that file unusable.

STEP 5

In Device Manager uninstall Standard VGA Adapter. It will prompt you to restart so do it. After install you will see a message saying that certain devices did NOT installed successfuly, which is GOOD . Go to Device Manager and you should see the exclamation point next to “video controller” and “video controller (vga compatible)”. Right-click on “video controller (vga compatible)” and do update driver. Choose “Browse for the Driver” (or something like it ). Point to the driver directory that you downloaded and extracted (win2000). Click “OK”. Wait for the driver to be installed. It might hang for a little (It will say that window is “not responding”). Do not worry as this is still installing the driver. It will prompt you to restart so do it. (If it does not prompt click anywhere and wait for message). After restart it will finish installing the driver.

Congratulations!!! You should have a working video driver!!!

STEP 6

Open c:\windows\system32\drivers\vgapnp.sys in any text editor. Remove the first character you put there which was x. Save the file. Your file will be usuable again . You can stop here if you want, but if you want to restore the permissions for the file to original state go to next step.

STEP 7

Right-click on any other file in the c:\windows\system32\drivers. Choose “Properties”. Go to “Security” tab. Now compare that security tab with the security tab of c:\windows\system32\drivers\vgapnp.sys. Just make sure the security tabs of those two files look the same (all tabs and advanced options). In order to add “TrustedInstaller” it is not the same as regular usernames because it is a service.
You will need to type “NT SERVICE\TrustedInstaller” (without quotes) when adding it to own the file and to have all permissions. Once you done editing you can delete your account from c:\windows\system32\drivers\vgapnp.sys, because it was not there from the beginning. We took control over and the previous commands added it by default.