Here's my somewhat harrowing video card adventure
from last night:
Along with my new HDD (to set up my dual boot) I got
a better video card--price was right, $15 after rebate
to upgrade from ATI x600 to a 3450. Seems like a good
enough card--I got a pcie-x16 card that works with
my old PC, it is fanless and I think shouldn't draw
too much for the 305w supply in this Dell Dimension.
So I remove all the old ATI software and the old drivers,
swap the cards, bootup and attempt to install the latest
Catalyst drivers. Halfway through the installation I get
a blue screen hardware fail, something about memory and
parity. Man, I'd have said a few choice words if my kids
hadn't been in the room.
Well, the system rebooted okay, and a second attempt
at installing the drivers seemed to work fine. XP
installed the sound drivers for the HDMI port on the
card, and after a bewildering 15 minutes of one
monitor being blank and then the other as I switched
settings around (and one monitor only getting a
severely degraded setting at one point) I finally
got my two monitors at the correct display and arranged
correctly with the primary desktop in front of me.
At first it didn't occur to me that my primary monitor
would now be #2 (it was #1 with my old card) and that
I had to drag it to the correct position
in display properties/settings tab.
The whole process probably took the better part of an
hour, which seems excessive. So far I've only run dxdiag,
which suggests the card probably works fine.
I was 90% sure I'd have to return the card at first,
but a little perseverance seems to have paid off.
I can't actually see a difference yet between the
old x600 video and this card, but for $15 I had to do it,
and getting an HDMI port my prove useful at some point. |
