Hi! First, thank you if you even consider helping me. I appreciate it!

I recently re-installed a copy of Oblivion onto my new laptop, followed by patches, followed by a few mods here and there, and I got all psyched up. Lo and behold that, after a bit of paying, my character's sword and shield would go white when I cast a spell on myself, like cure. Using my vast detective skills, I figured it might have something to do with the initial glow, so I installed a new mod to kill that glow. All was well for a while. THEN I put on an Arena Raiment, and my characters eyes, mouth, and weapons all went white.

This happens with any suit of armor that is full-body, such as the Dark Brotherhood's. This odd phenomenon is apparent in several NPCs, with white axes, daggers, and occasionally white eyes and mouths.

I don't think it needs to be said that I find this to be disturbing.

A Few System Specs:

Name: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200
Current Display Mode: 1366 x 768 (32 bit)
Driver Model: WDDM 1.1

While I find myself a bit helpless, I've found that this is not an uncommon issue. Specifically with laptop users, as far as I can tell from my google searches and prior forum lurking. And as far as I can tell, it doesn't have to do much with mods.

Thank you very much.

The 4200 is not a "Card", it is a mere chip, and even a couple of the recent Sandy Bridge Intel video chips have beaten it, not that they are useful to play games with, either. "newness" is not now, and has not ever been, any kind of measure of quality. Cheap hardware is cheap hardware, and isn't intended for gaming with. When you do sort out whatever is going on with the textures, and it isn't just the very low quality video doing it, if you persist with overstressing the machine so far beyond what it was designed to do, its useful life will be cut short. It will run hot, and has inadequate means to recover from that, so it will degrade relatively rapidly. That's the cost of letting the budget idea get the most attention.

I'll remember that bit about the 4200.

So, if I might interpret, what you're telling me is that I have cheap hardware that can't run Oblivion, and I've paid the price for having a new "cheap" laptop, etc.

If I might draw your attention away from the fact that the 4200 is a cheapy, and that I'm not thoroughly computer savvy, could you offer any other solution than buying a new laptop/new card? Or any solution at all, please?

Textures are rendered by the combination of graphics drivers plus Direct3D plus the game software. One of those is corrupt, out of date, or in conflict. Oblivion certainly will be able to "run", although it would not meet my standards for that definition, when you match it to the correct Dx9 APIs and drivers. What it won't do, is keep on "running" that way over the long distance. It will eventually kill the little laptop. If it is your wish to replace it because it has burned itself out long before its time, you can start making changes to the three softwares involved, starting with graphics drivers.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=3b170b25-abab-4bc3-ae91-50ceb6d8fa8d

I'll make sure to find peace with my murdering my little laptop.

I've uninstalled and re-installed the game software, but do not know which driver would be an adequate replacement for the WDDM 1.1, or even what Direct3D is. Do you have any insight as to what could replace/repair WDDM 1.1 on Windows 7, and what I could do about Direct3D?

DirectX 9.0c: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2da43d38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3

I think you can find drivers for you chip on ATI's site. Just fill out the download form according to your system information.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx <-- I don't know what OS you are using, but for the other fields: Integrated MOBO, Radeon HD Series, 4200


--Tomlong75210