sm bus controller problme

[trebor]

I am helping a friend with a Gateway system. He had Vista but was having problems and decided to downgrade to XP. All went well except there are two devices - SM BUS CONTROLLER and OTHER PCI BRIDGE DEVICE that needs a driver. The motherboard is an NVIDIA. I downloaded the latest NVIDIA Graphics driver but that did not do anything for these two devices. Where can I find the proper motherboard chipset driver for the Nvidia motherboard? Also, If we leave these two devices without drivers, what does that do to the computer? Thanks for your help.

[viking33]

trebor,
What chipset is on that MB?
Did you uninstall the old drivers before installing the new?

There is a site on download.com that claims to have SM Bus drivers for Nvidia HERE
Check it out.

[trebor]

The chipset supposedly is Nvidia Gforce 6150 SE. The site you included was for DELL computers and it did not work on the Gateway. Do you have any idea what would happen if we simply did not load drivers for the two devices? Would it cause a problem with the system?

[viking33]

How about checking HERE
It lists a ton of Nvidia drivers including the Gforce 6150. Carefully scroll down he list. There are quite a few.

There is also a place at the top right of that page to do a scan of your computer to check for drivers.

So far as not loading the drivers, I would suspect at minimum, very slow performance if not any at all. Only way to see is to try to disable them in Device Manager and see what happens .

[trebor]

I helped another friend downgrade a Dell system from Vista to XP. It was very interesting to find that the Dell needed the same drivers as the Gateway - again all related to NVIDIA. Dell however had drivers available for XP which Gateway did not. The SM Bus controller was part of the video card driver. The other bridge device was actually the Nvidia Network Card. Thanks again for your help.