Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Well, everything seemed to work okay for several hours, and then the system locked up. This time the display went wonky rather than just everything freezing. Uh, it's different!
Time to vent a little hardware frustration. You've been warned. ;-)
Before I removed the old video card I went to the ATI support site and left negative feedback for the drivers. Problem is, they want your e-mail address but they don't get back in touch, even if you ask a question. In fact, they state on the form that they're not going to get back in touch with you. That's just plain bad customer service.
Here's the thing: I've been using ATI All-in-Wonder cards since (I think) the very first and have absolutely loved them - until this past fall. Coincidentally, that was my first ATI purchase after they had been acquired by AMD. Now I love AMD processors, so it seemed a match made in Heaven. Sadly, ATI seems to have deteriorated, and fast.
It took them forever to simply acknowledge that tuner support wouldn't work under Vista. Beyond that, there's noting. Not even the traditional finger pointed in the direction of Redmond. (I mean the index finger...) I find that odd because some of the chatter I've been reading on message boards suggests that Microsoft may be at least partially to blame for changing how tuners work with Vista. Of course, ATI (and other companies) have presumably had plenty of time to make this adjustment, and by September of last year they should have known that their hardware just wasn't going to work with Vista. Of course, I bought the card because the box said it supported XP 64-bit. Yes, it did - but only for video support. This was terribly misleading and I feel as though I've wasted a chunk of change. ATI has not seen fit to respond to my (or presumably anyone else's) pleas for answers.
I decided that before I went crazy and uninstalled the video card I should check out the NVIDIA site for Vista support for the chipset that was built into my motherboard. I assumed that minimal support would be available, but experience tells me that it's not good to rely on assumptions. Wonder of wonders, NVIDIA said that not only do they support Vista (this chipset is two generations old), but they want users to report problems and (cue the heavenly chorus) they'll get back with you to help solve your problems. (Reality check: I have yet to need to contact NVIDIA support, but after weeks of banging my head against the monitor, that was balm to my bruised head.)
I had one false start when I discovered that my image editing software wouldn't run (I got the splash screen and a preview of an error message when I rolled my mouse over the taskbar. Odd.). That problem was solved by installing the beta drivers.
So far just one lockup, and that may be related to my ongoing headaches with getting Windows Mobile Device Manager to work with my iPaq.
I do have one frustration: I can't get dual monitor support. Oh, the ECS motherboard manual cunningly states that the chipset supports dual displays, but NVIDIA's site states that while that's true, it's up to the device manufacturer to make sure that there are two ports for the monitors. Guess how many ports my motherboard has? You've got it. At this point I'm willing to trade screen real estate for fewer lockups and reboots.
So far no BSODs.
Time to start dinner. I'll post a picture before I run along.
Tags: Technology