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Onboard video

Older, cheaper, and less powerful computers come with onboard video. That term means the video circuits live directly on your PC’s motherboard, the large flat platter inside your PC that all the computer’s other parts connect to. The video has been reduced to a few low-power chips and tossed onto the motherboard.

Look where your monitor’s cable plugs into your PC, as shown in Figure 7-2. If the cable plugs in near where your mouse and keyboard plug in, your PC is cursed with onboard video.

Figure 7-2: PCs with onboard video have their monitors plug in near the top; PCs with video cards have their monitors plug into a port on a silver strip along the middle or bottom.:

Onboard video can be upgraded by slipping a video card into the PC’s unused video slot. The next section explains how to see which type of video slot lives inside your PC so you can slip the right type of video card into it.

Almost all laptops come with onboard video. Unfortunately, none of them have a video slot. That means you can’t upgrade their video, nor can most laptops access Vista’s most graphics-intensive features. Contact your laptop’s manufacturer to see if they support video upgrades for your model, but don’t be surprised when they say no.

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