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Mon 22 Aug, 2005 04:25 am
I spent much of Saturday putting a computer together from parts for a friend, and everything seemed to work as advertised EXCEPT for an ATI/Radeon graphics card which cost around $90 with about 256 mb of ram.
Neither the drivers provided nor the DVD software which came with seemed to work with Windows XP. We almost lost the whole XP installation on account of it. We got the blue screen once and, on the next boot up, the system seemed to be bright enough to revert to the driver which XP had loaded originally for the ATI card, but which only had 800x600 and 1024x756 resolutions.
This pretty much puts ATI on my shitlist. Anybody else have any similar experiences?
You could try these drivers from ATI:
http://www2.ati.com/drivers/Catalyst_58_release_notes.html
There is no reason why the drivers shipped would not work with Windows XP, though. It's not impossible that the graphics card is broken.
Thanks. Haven't decided what to do with the ATI card yet.
Prolly the best test would be to try the card and its shipped drivers in another, known-good machine, and ttry a known-good card and drivers in the new machine.. If the new card/driver setup won't work in machine 2, while machine 2's card/driver setup works OK on machine 1, odds are heavilly stacked in favor of the card being bad - it happens. If machine 1 still has problems with what is known to be a good card/driver setup, then the focus shifts to machine 1.
The friend got the thing to work last night, but apparently it involved downloading driver software and two or three other kinds of msoft stuff off the net, i.e. the thing as packaged in the box was not capable of working.
That's basically what you'd call a bleeding-edge consumer product.
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