I Hate ATI - FINAL EDITION

After a very long hiatus I decided to lose 45 minutes of my life and finally upgrade the drivers for my Radeon X1300 on my "old" (circa 2003 - JESUS! That is old!) Windows XP box.

So I sashayed over to ATI/AMD and looked around for the driver-of-the-month.

To my astonishment, the driver was three months old!

Not only that, it was classified as a legacy driver.

Yes, Windows XP is on its last legs, boys and girls. I suppose I could upgrade it but I very rarely use the Old Girl for anything except running Virtual Machines. It currently hosts the VM for the Proxy Project, which runs 24x7, but it still runs UT99 better than my dual AMD64 Windows 7 laptop (recently upgraded from Vista).

Anyway, I downloaded the last ATI driver and played some UT today. It ran nicely, but it made me nostalgic for the Good Old Days back when a 3.4mHz "single core" P4 was a hot system.

And now I can't even complain about the drivers anymore.

RESOLVED: I Hate ATI

Today, I got home from eating breakfast out with the wife (Pinky Dink), turn on my barely one year old Samsung 216BW widescreen monitor and everything was piss-yellow.

I fired up the ATI Catalyst Control Center (which I hate) and bumped the blue channel up until it looked OK. That was fine for a few minutes, but it started going yellow on me again, sort of pulsating.

Certain the monitor was dying, I switched to another box (I have five boxes on a keyboard/mouse/video [KVM] switch). Every box was fine, so I went back to Old Yellowstain and twiddled the cable.

The screen went black and the box rebooted. No video. At all.

Popped the side cover off and pulled the video card out. The cooling fan was jammed tight.

Another. Fucking. Fan. GRRRRRRRRR.

I dropped back to the built-in Radeon Express 200 and it was fine (after a little screwing around). Played a few rounds of UT with no problems.

Obviously during these last ten or eleven months of crashing UT, dicking around with drivers, changing the hardware, etc., the problem was a lousy, fucking, pancake fan.

I ran out and bought an NVidia card to replace it. 9400 GT. No SLI support, which I can't use in this box anyway, having only one PCI-e slot. Off-brand (PNY), sixty-five bucks (which means you can probably get it for $49.95 at TigerDirect), 512MB of RAM (the old one had 256).

It, too, has a fucking fan, meaning some day it will die. By that time, I'm sure I'll be able to get a 1T card for sixty five bucks.

Now, as to why I hate ATI.

It was the FAN, right? No reason to hate ATI. After all, they didn't design the fan.

What I hate about ATI, what I really, really HATE is that bloated, steaming pile of shit called "The Catalyst Control Center" (CCC). After a reboot it takes forever and a day and a half to give you back control of your system once you log in. NVidia's equivalent (NVidia Control Panel) takes seconds to light up in the system tray and you're ready to rock and roll.

The only reason I was running CCC was it was the only way to turn on the "VPU Recover" option (much easier with the Omega driver).

So there you have it. I will probably be playing UT a lot more this Winter.

See you online!

ATI Drivers: The Never-Ending Battle

I really thought I had it hammered.

I removed "everything Apple" (iTunes, Bonjour, QuickTime, etc.) from my system and UT99 stopped crashing.

For about a week.

Then it started up again, so I gave in and downloaded the ATI Radeon Driver-of-the-Month (dated last Thursday) and installed it. Usually this is guaranteed to lose me forty five minutes of my life.

Not this time. It was more like three hours and a dozen or so reboots and fucking around with the Windows XP registry.

But it did work. UT stopped crashing. I played several rounds at BOT House and EXP3 and was very satisfied that the system was stable again. I might even put that Apple crap back on.

Then... I noticed something.

My CD and DVD drives had vanished. They had the "yellow piss stain of shame" in Device Manager and they didn't show up in Windows Explorer.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

I did the usual: uninstall and let Windows rediscover them, reboot, and... nothing.

Same story over and over, "Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)"

It was getting late, so I went to bed. After my first cup of coffee the next morning I had a moment of crystal clarity:

"GOOGLE IT YOU FUCKING USELESS MORON!!!"

The first hit did the trick and I got my drives back.

Take this as a lesson: "Google first, fuck around second!"

It seems this is a very common problem although why a video driver update would affect IDE drives baffles me (although I am easily baffled these days... probably due to the early onset of Alzheimer's).

Then, while bitching and whining about this problem on a message board, someone pointed out there was an option: Omega Drivers. It turns out some clown with too much time on his hands has been tweaking the ATI reference drivers for a few years (he also does NVidia and 3dfx).

That was news to me.

I downloaded the "latest" (January '08) Omega driver, but decided against installing it because all the tweaks seem to be centered around the Catalyst interface, which I despise and never install (and yes I did install it as part of the troubleshooting process - it didn't help and only contributes to an extra long login process while it does... whatever it does).

I might be compelled to try it out if someone can give me a testamonial. The research I did indicates all the performance "enhancements" are subjective and anecdotal, but if they helped you out, let me know.

UPDATE

The ATI Driver-of-the-Month crashed, so I installed the Omega driver. It crashed too, but the system recovered with only a screwed-up desktop resolution (and brightness/contrast/gamma) when I quit UT.

Also, there is no Catalyst driver whatsoever, so it's not as bad as I thought.