I’m so afraid.
I’ve just put in my replacement video card into the gaming PC. My roommate and I are fairly certain that was the problem, so I tried to RMA my busted card to Newegg, but they wouldn’t take it without the box. Fair enough.
So I ordered a new one, since my roommate has said he’ll pay for any broken parts. Here goes nothing.
Okay, it’s booting. It was doing that before, then shutting down after it got to the Vista chime.
We have a login prompt!
So far so good, although it appears that the card is recognized as different hardware than the old one, so it wants new drivers. I bet I can do that.
New drivers downloading. (Man, this upgraded Cablevision connection is faster. That was like a 60MB Catalyst driver download in under ten seconds.)
These drivers have a picture of a lady with a sword inside of them. I really wish they didn’t. It’s embarrassing. Almost as embarrassing as the ersatz Lara Croft on my Radeon box.
Uncheck the World of Warcraft free trial. I’d never get anything done if I did that.
Having a momentary bit of doubt that I actually bought an ATI card, not an Nvidia card. But nope, it’s a 4870.
I wonder if I should have deleted the old Catalyst drivers first. This is nerve-wracking waiting for it to complete!
The progress bar for the “Installing: ATI Display Driver” keeps moving towards the end of the bar, then doesn’t actually fill it up.
Shock! Horror! The screen flashed, then went totally screwy, spraying pixels all over. For a moment I thought something died. Then I realized that my HDTV (a Westinghouse) doesn’t handle signal resolution switches very well. I power cycled it and everything was dandy again. Whew!
Okay, Catalyst installation complete, which means it wants a reboot. I’m always so nervous to reboot, but I guess I should just man up.
Alright, I’ve rebooted, but something is amiss. Windows is still asking for drivers for the card. I have no idea why, but I’m going to let it take a crack at it without my assistance. Don’t fail me now, little spinning green ball!
Hrm, yes, something is amiss. It’s not recognizing the drivers as valid. I’m going to have to dig into this.
Looks like I’m going to try removing all the drivers, then reinstalling them. Don’t know why it wouldn’t have recognized that the new card was what I was trying to use — especially since it’s working, albeit in VGA mode — but I’ll give it a shot.
Hey, looking good! I can now move up to 1080p, which stands for “positive”.
Refreshing the Vista Assessment tool to see how I’m doing…5.7! Up from 5.6!
Let the gaming and testing begin!
