no_spam_paquette@uwo.ca added these comments in the current
discussion du jour ...
> Right you both are--and just when I thought AMD/ATI was
> finally getting its act together on XP drivers (leaving aside
> the fact that they've sold those of us who bought a recent AIW
> down the river on Vista support!). I've actually had pretty
> good luck lately with their drivers--until yesterday's
> nightmare.
Actually, yours is the first I've heard of an ATI driver bringing
down a system even minorly. Maybe it is the added complexity of
your All-In-One card, since what died was your TV viewing that I
don't have.
After I'd responded to you yesterday, I thought a bit about how
I'd adopted my "if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it"
mentality. I have old mainframe experience and have been doing
PCs at various levels of technicality since the old Apple ][ in
1978. I was always searching for the newest hardware, software
revision, O/S, drivers, whatever. Not surprisingly, I spent a LOT
of time getting all this crap to work right. One day sometime in
the summer of 1995 I had almost a religious awakening and
realized that I was spending more time beating my system into
doing my bidding than it was providing useful work to me.
So, I just stopped cold turkey. Not much after that, I also
adopted the firm belief NOT to buy v1.0 of anything, unless the
new features are so overwhelmingly important to risk a melt-down.
My rationale is that I don't do beta testing with my Visa card,
so something like Vista is to me at least 18 months away.
> I finally restored the XP partition from a ten-day-old ghost
> image. All I really had to do then was reinstall three
> applications I had installed since and all was well again.
Glad to hear you got out of this mess relatively unscathed!
> Of course, I still wonder what is going on. My hypothesis is
> that they've got stuff hard-coded in their installation
> software that requires access to a "C" drive (they admit it
> for one of their recent cards but the registry entries are
> different for mine and I couldn't find anything that looked
> like a registry entry looking for access to the "C" drive
> (which, being the Vista partition, is hidden when I'm in XP
> using EasyBCD and NeoGrub).
>
> I'm now back to my former dread of ATI driver installation and
> won't soon be trying to fix anything connected with my new
> x1900 that isn't "broken!"
>
> Thanks for the responses in any case.
>
> Thank God for Ghost!!!
Yepper! In my case, it is Acronis True Image 9.0, which I hope I
NEVER need. You have helped me as well by tightening my resolve
not to upgrade even presumed good company software/drivers. I
have also been a big believer in ATI.
> On Jul 21, 6:53 pm, "HEMI-Powered" <n...@none.en> wrote:
>> Henry Bemis added these comments in the current discussion du
>> jour ...
>>
>> > I recommend you not upgrade drivers for any 'working' ATI
>> > product.
>>
>> > It is never a good experience.
>>
>> > I eventually uninstalled the whole ATI drivers and now only
>> > use the Video drivers. For TV I use a Hauppage card now.
>>
>> > I went thru two years of driver hell with my All in Wonder.
>> > And yes, I followed directions to a T.
>>
>> > If you can restore to a previous point, do so now.
>>
>> I said the very same thing, Henry. The one big thing in the
>> OP's favor is that he at least has a more reliable ATI card.
>> Problems with upgraded nVidia drivers literally destroying
>> Windows requiring a nuke and reinstall are common. Even if
>> they don't kill Windows they are a major PITA to fix. As to
>> the All In One, I looked at that when I had my current PC
>> built but decided I was never going to watch TV in my office,
>> so I passed in favor of the simpler but far more reliable
>> Radeon. Have had a lick of trouble yet with the original
>> driver.
>>
>>
>>
>> > < This morning I decided to update the drivers when
>> > driveragent noted
>> >> that new drivers were available. I downloaded the
>> >> drivers, dutifully uninstalled everything from ATI,
>> >> deleted the ATI folder and installed the new drivers in
>> >> order (all of them) as exactly as directed on the ADM/ATI
>> >> site rebooting when directed.
>>
>> >> Now the TV player won't work. I get a TV Player failed to
>> >> initialize message box. I even tried uninstalling and
>> >> reinstalling a second time--same thing!
>>
>> >> DirectX 9c is installed--in any case, things were woking
>> >> with the old drivers.
>>
>> >> Any ideas???
>>
>> --
>> HP, aka Jerry
>
>
>
--
HP, aka Jerry