Joho the Blog
|
|
|
June 24, 2003
Continuing to crash the ol' PC. The latest was more polite than usual. As I was working, my screen snapped to 640x480 with 4-bit color. A message box said that there was no driver for my graphics card (Radeon 9700). It rebooted to the minimal resolution, but I was able to get it back to a reasonable display by using Display Properties as usual. So, is there a problem with my graphics card, or did something else wipe out its drivers? (XP's error reporting system says that it's a problem with the ATI driver, but I had already installed the latest and greatest.) Posted
by D. Weinberger at June 24, 2003 02:46 PM
|
Comments
Have you considered Linux as an alternative? I'm not a hardcore penguinista nerd, just someone who managed to install Mandrake 9.1 (downloadable from www.mandrake.com) in a dual-boot configuration with Windows XP without a single hitch this morning. All my hardware - heavy-duty GeForce graphics card and WiFi card included - was recognized and configured correctly, and I was surfing half an hour after I put the DVD (got it with the latest issue of Linux Format, in fact) in my PC. Might be worth a try as XP seems to be playing up a lot...
Posted by: Eirik Newth | June 24, 2003 03:02 PM
No expert but I'd check if your graphics card is overheating? Get the PC Store guys to loan you a cheapo second hand one to see if it still crashes after its installed.
Posted by: Gary Turner | June 24, 2003 04:12 PM
You probably have a 64MB graphics card. The skinny is that these are not yet ready for prime-time and cause exactly the behavior you report. Especially with WinXP.
If you do a search for "64MB video RAM" you may be able to find out more.
Hopefully the upgrades will hit the shelves soon. Good luck!
d
Posted by: neon | June 24, 2003 04:35 PM
Go Back to the StoneAge,
...no crash problems...!!!
Cheers =)
Posted by: Riccardo | June 25, 2003 07:46 AM