Purple Heart and Bravery award for installing Vista
After an all night effort I still haven't finished my Vista install...
Mid last week my PC at home had an issue where it wouldn't boot.. basically something happened to the Windows Boot Loader and also Windows itself that made it unrepairable... so as the week before I bought an AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 Dual Core CPU it was bundled with a copy of Vista Home Basic x64, so I said why not be brave and install it.
So first it started to install, then for some reason the screen went blank but the install kept on going... so it finally rebooted itself but it actually didn't complete the install. So I tried again and it did install...
Then when it reboot and started Vista it got to the point where Windows starts up and the monitor went to sleep. So then I rebooted into VGA compatible mode and it did eventually come up. So while it was up I went to install my old programs on there, and found an issue... my VPN clients didn't work with Vista... and many other utilities didn't work anymore under Vista. WHAT A PAIN!!!! So at this point I thought that I would have a second crack at fixing graphics card issue.
So I downloaded latest drivers from ATI, which are now owned by AMD (BTW... An excellent combination of products I can't wait to see what they will come out with in the near future), and rebooted and the same thing happened... except this time the only mode it would come up in is Safe Mode.
So I decided to Google the issue to see if there is a known problem... and to my surprise there was.... just my luck... I found out that there is an issue with my motherboard A8R32-MVP Deluxe and my specific brand and chipset and model of my graphics card Gigabyte ATI Radeon X1900XTX 512MB PCI-E card where the latest Catalyst drivers don't work. Even on Windows XP it wouldn't work with any ATI driver later than the one the card shipped with.
So now its going to cost me over $500 to change graphics card to one that works (and has similar specs to the Radeon X1900XTX). I think I might go with an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS 320MB PCI-E card as the specs look good. Thanks to Ebay I can sell my old card and recuperate the money I spent on it. So in summary Vista was free but I will need to spend $500 odd dollars to actually use it!!!
Funniest thing of the lot is that I installed Solaris Express on there and it worked first time no issues.... pity Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142 and Fifa 2007 don't run on anything but Windows... (well they do run on Playstation 2's but that's not a real computer).
Now thinking about it... Google and Ebay will play a big part of fixing my issue and they both Sun Microsystems customers... so if you look at 6 degrees of separation... Sun fixed my problem... Having worked for Sun for 11 years now it always brings a smile to my face when I see "Powered by Sun". Cool things is earlier in the week I has an issue finding a hotel for a work trip.. so I went to http://wotif.com and found a really nice hotel at half the rack rate. Cool thing was that it ran on Sun products. I brought my little cousins to see Charlottes Web and the Spiders and Charlotte are created on Sun hardware. My bank that I have my home loan and general banking with (which I won't mention their name), their Internet banking runs on Sun. My drivers licence and car registration information is all stored on Sun equipment... Sun is everywhere.
Signing off... just about to go and finish off another Proof of Concept...
Cyaz, Maurice
Posted at 08:55AM Mar 02, 2007 by sunraybruce in General |