So probably about five years ago or even less than that I got this new video card. The GeForce GT 9800. I forgot how many rams it had, but I do want to say it was like 512mb of ram. I can’t remember cause it was a while ago when I paid attention to it. I probably should have kept the box for reference. Anyway just last week that particular video card started to show signs of it dying. I mean my computer screen would show green streaks, or the whole screen would freeze up and not respond. I re-installed the video driver and that seemed to fix the problem for a little while. This past two days my video card just didn’t want to fix itself. So pretty much showing me that it’s on it’s last circuit. The screen would freeze up every time I load up the computer and well that would not do for me.
So my husband bought me a new video card. At first it was a Geforce GT 550 1GB. I opened it up and I found that it had a DVI and a VGA slot. Which was fine but I would have to pull the cables from my tablet out and find my VGA to DVI cable for the tablet and go through the whole process of pulling the cable around the desk to the tablet power unit and that would’ve been such a pain in the ass for me since I don’t have long arms. Anyway when I stated that the hubby said to just don’t put it in the computer and pack it back up and he’ll get another one. He sounded annoyed when he told me that so I just packed it back up.
He exchanged it the next day for a ATI Raedon R6670 2GB, for $50 more. So I spent that night for four hours trying to set up the graphics card. It was working the moment I installed it and then I used the CD to install the driver so I could get it back to my resolution. However when I restarted after the install the screen was black after I logged into my desktop and would not load anything else for 30 mins. At first I thought, hey it’s just lag loading like when I installed 50 fonts that one time, so I forced restarted the computer went into Safe Mode with Network and downloaded an updated driver and then installed it. Apparently it kept saying that it couldn’t find a detection driver or something which was pretty stupid. For four hours I spent restarting, rebooting, going to normal mode and then back to safe mode. Finally I just got so fed up I decided to do a system restore. Then I got to thinking, the last time I tried to do a system restore the computer couldn’t find a restore point. Luckily for me there was a system restore point of four days ago which was when the computer last worked before the dying graphics card.
So I did a system restore and everything went back to normal. I went and deleted my old drivers from the old video card an manually updated the current video driver through Device and Hardware settings. It seems the “Catalyst” program from ATI is the main source of the problems I had tonight cause I didn’t install it at all and I got the graphics driver working with the new video card. So in light of all this event the “Catalyst” program was too much of a headache to use to install the drivers. Seriously why is it such a pain in the ass? I never had this much problems with NVidia, and even people told me to get ATI cause they said it was a good graphics card brand and the things I had experienced tonight is probably the reasons why I stopped using ATI long ago.
All an all I got it to work with out having to use that dumb “Catalyst” program. Sadly though my laptop is defaulted to have the Catalyst program cause it’s pre-setup that way. Of course I don’t plan on using my laptop as a hardcore gaming laptop anyway. Not enought ram, or juice power to do so. Plus I do not want to push my laptop to the brink of explosion. I’m trying my best to make this laptop last a good long while because it’ll probably be another 2 or 3 years before I can replace it.
As for the new video card I probably will update later on a review of how it works with WoW and other games I play on my PC. I have logged onto WoW for 30 mins to test it out to make sure it was going to work fine and it seemed to runs smoothly after I reduced my graphic settings to something worth 60fps. I had to turn the settings in WoW to ultra to see how it looked and it was doing 30 FPS. Which isn’t really bad considering my old video card was doing 15 fps on ultra setting, but again I don’t want to push my new video card to hard. I want to make sure the video card can last for a good while so turned it down to a customizable setting that I always had it set as. Although I think I turned some of the stuff up one level, and to see it still give me 60 fps is all good to me.
Tags: 2GB, ATI, catalyst, computers, drivers, installation nightmare, NVidia GeForce 9800, Raedeon R6670, video card
