Tuesday 13 February 2007

Pic of the day: Box for Club x1600PRO video card. It is ATI based rather than the NVIDIA based card I had before, but otherwise should be better. If it works.

New video card (almost)

Remember how my video card started making horrible noise (from its fan) after 9 months? How I returned it to the shop before Xmas and did not hear from them again? How I talked to them a few days ago and they did not have that particular brand anymore, but promised me a new and better card instead?

Today was the day when I got the new card. Well, new... the box was sealed with a small circular label, but not shrinkwrapped. Then again, it was European, not American. Perhaps they were just environment conscious or something... Yeah, right.

I am sure you see where this all is going. I installed the new card, and my screen was filled with colors. Random colors. Well, they were to some degree non-random in that they appeared vaguely as columns on the screen, but most of all it looked like static.

I plugged back in the old Geforce 2 card, which uses an ordinary PCI slot while the new uses PCI-express. So I can have them both at the same time. While doing this, I installed the appropriate drivers for the new card. At least the machine could read what kind of card it was. But it could not use it.

There is a saying that what you get for nothing is often worth what you pay for it. But in this case it is not really for nothing, since I paid for the original card which I no longer have. So, back to the shop I shall go. And this time I am not going to wait for weeks. On the contrary, I will visit them every workday until they get fed up with my whining and give me my right.