Graphics card update question

Hi

When I first got my computer, it came with all kinds of free updates for life with it like most do. (Vista BTW) anyway I discovered that on this computer unlike my other computer, you couldn't load textures unless they were a power of 2 in width and height. My computer recently did one of those auto-update things and now blitz can load any size of textures (ex 132*43)... Was this some kind of update to my graphics card? Can all computers load any shape of texture?

Most videocards cannot load non-power of two textures. I suggest you confirm that non-power of two textures are really loading correctly by displaying the TextureWidth() and TextureHeight() after loading them. In any case, you should not be using textures unless they're powers of two because they're incompatible with a lot of actions, and liable to crash for no apparent reason. Even with DX9, I'm not sure if they work at all in DX7, which is what B3D uses.

oh ok I will try to avoid them.