Software under XP cannot detect refresh rate

A

aranganath

Bit poster
My wife uses Parallels on her MacBook to run XP. She uses a piece of software called DirectRT which allow her to create interactive tests that measure response time. Apparently, it tries to detect the Refresh Rate of the display, and Parallels isn't returning a value. The exact error is this:

"directRT cannot determine your screens refresh rate which is critical for accurate timing. The cause of this usually an outdated or disabled video driver, or disabled hardware acceleration in your video settings. error #6"

Is this something that can be corrected? If so, what setting should I alter to do this. It's not necessary that it be completely accurate on this machine, as it won't be running the production tests, but she would like to develop the tests on it.
 
There is no video hardware acceleration in Parallels as the "video card" being used by Windows is acuallty a piece of software. (The VM itself)

I suppose you could fake it into thinking it is 60hz...

Try forcing the monitor to a generic 1024x768 (or whatever rsolution you are using) at 60hz under Device Manager. You would have to remove the "default monitor" and add a new one manually in safe mode. Try this on a VM you don't care about as it might break things. It would work on real hardware, but I don't know how much of the processing logic Parallels put into the monitor driver.

I would expect timing measurements of human input to be completely wrong within Parallels, as all the IO (including the keyboard and mouse) are being passed through 2 operating systems. I would guess measurements for things like reflexes would be off by at least an order of magnatude.
 
That would be fine. As I said, she would only be developing the tests on this machine. They use special keyboards because the latency of normal keyboards is too high. The machine's in the lab generating actual data are configured for this task. I'll give this a shot.
 
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