It’s been a while since I posted anything meaningful (or much for that matter), and that’s not about to change.
Thursday night I thought I’d order a GeForce 7950GT. Tuesday came (roughly 5:30 PM), I saw a brown box sitting there with “DirectCanada.ca” plastered all over it. First piece of good news in what seemed like months, as I had already gotten my new card. I promptly tore open the box, scattered Styrofoam packing peanuts all over the living room floor, and gazed upon my new baby.
6:30 rolled around and I thought I’d test drive my new card. Upon removing my 6600GT and inserting the 7950GT, I saw this card blocked the little ejecty tab from my AGP slot. “No biggie,” I thought to myself, as I could slide something underneath to jimmy it out. I put my case back together, plugged everything in, and fired up the beast.
A feeling of excitement came over me as my computer came to life, and I saw “XFX GeForce 7950 GT blah blah blah” pop up on screen. The Windows XP loading bar doohicky appeared, and a feeling of uncertainty came as my monitor went black, showing only a gray box with the words “Input Not Supported”. A few seconds went by, and my monitor came back to life.
I then attempted to log in. Attempted. With the monitor cutting in and out telling me “Input Not Supported” and “No Signal” randomly while the resolution changed itself repeatedly, logging in was quite an ordeal. I thought it was maybe a driver problem, although it shouldn’t be, as the two cards use the same driver, so I popped in the CD and installed the drivers thereon. Twice. I couldn’t navigate my way though the menus the first time with the monitor cutting in and out.
I restarted. “Success!” I thought to myself, breathing a sigh of relief. I updated my drivers, to the version I had before. So far so good. Until I started doing stuff. Certain tasks caused the “No Signal”, while others caused “Input Not Supported”. After 2 hours on Google, I said “Fuck it” and put my old card back. All seemed well…
Until I tried to use the Internet. My network card wasn’t recognized. Maybe a System Restore will do the trick? Restoring to 3 days prior seemed like a decent idea. I guess I was wrong. On next reboot, all’s working fine, I boot into Windows. Lo and behold, no input. From damn near anything. No keyboard, no mouse, only monitor (which didn’t cut in and out, so I guess there’s one positive).
So I fall back on Ubuntu. Keyboard works, mouse works, network card doesn’t. Switched to the one built into my motherboard (which Windows outright refused to use [pretty much told me “Yeah, I know it’s there, but you ain’t using it, white boy”]) which is now working after changing some settings.
So, now I sit here, backing up files before attempting to reformat my Windows partition and reinstall XP. Again.
I guess that’s all, that was quite a bit of wordery, Volume Two might come soon.
