Trying to save my ancient laptop!

I needed a basic laptop to hook up to a Microscribe arm. Nothing fancy - it just has to be able to run Rhino 5 and give me access to the 3D digitising toolbar and let me set up new layers to help me make sense of all the points once I get back to my workstation. No huge files or rendering or any other arduous stuff. Also, it may get used in some fairly dirty environments. I didn’t want to spend out on something high spec & precious.

So I dusted off my venerable Dell M90, which I haven’t used for a while but didn’t want to chuck it as it’s still in very good condition. It’s also sporting a reasonable SSD and Windows 10. GPU is a Quadro FX1500m. Device ID is NVIDIA_DEV.029B.01

Rhino 5 installed without a problem, aside from the usual warning on first start up that the driver is too old and I should update it. I’ve had this before but tbh haven’t noticed any problems. Until now. With hardware acceleration enabled in Rhino, mouse right-click and hold will neither pan the ortho views or rotate the perspective view. The cursor changes to a hand/orbit symbol, but the view is completely unresponsive. All other controls (button clicks, pop-up, right click etc) seem to work fine. Driver version is 259.47 - well behind the minimum recommendation of version 340.66, but the more recent drivers have no support for my venerable GPU and simply won’t install. A driver of similar vintage seemed to run Rhino 5 OK on Windows 7 - I never had a problem with viewport manipulation, that’s for certain.

If I disable hardware acceleration, view manipulation works as it should, but I get nasty moire effects and no antialiasing, plus the usual glitchiness associated with Microsoft basic drivers.

Is there any fix for this?

I believe that in Dell laptops of that vintage the video cards are plugin. You might consider confirming this and look into upgrading the video card.

Unfortunately the only upgrades available are the FX2500 & FX3500. Both are of similar age and architechture to my FX1500. The displaced cooling system they employ (the heatsinks are on the end of some fairly tortuous copper tubes) means that it’s not really possible to fit any other cards.