Driver Issues with TurboCAD and Windows 10

What’s a driver?

When offered a free upgrade to Windows 10, many people have downloaded it only to find that things had gone a bit skew whiff. This is because if you download a new operating system, you may also need to update your graphics card drivers and that was probably not made clear to you – so here’s a little information that should help.

Drivers are a bunch of files that enable hardware devices to communicate with the computer’s operating system, a sort of translator, and they are operating system specific, i.e. – change your operating system – change your drivers – they go together. Do one and not the other and you could have problems.

For users who are doing fairly straight forward 2D line drawings, there is a quick fix which avoids the complications of changing your drivers and that is to swap from Redsdk to GDI, where to do this is shown below.

For most TurboCAD users, this simple quick fix solves their problem. The program restarts and everything is fine. However, this is not ideal. One drawback is that you can no longer use materials, Redsdk materials will not work in GDI. So if you want materials, you’ll probably need to install the latest graphics card drivers. (This may have occurred automatically).

To install the correct driver for your computer you need to go to the manufacturer’s web page and find the software and driver downloads section. Here it will ask you to identify your computer by inputting essential information such as model or serial number, from there you’ll be lead to a page with a list of downloads and you will want to look for the one relating to graphics.

So now you are in the correct place, all the information you have typed in is correct and all you have to do is press the download button. First just ask yourself a couple of questions – are you sure everything you’ve typed in is correct? – are you sure that anything on the computer that is really important to you is backed up? Do you really know what you are doing?

If you cannot say Yes for sure 100% to all those questions, my advice would be to get an expert to do it for you.

Paul