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like a true fly-by-night hardware company Friday, May 8 2009
I'd received another PCI-Express video card in the mail and today I planned to install it in my computer (Woodchuck), thereby getting all four of my monitors working. It was an Nvidia Geforce 9400GT, and I aimed to couple it with my Nvidia PCI-non-Express video card, a Geforce FX 5200. Supporting two monitors each, I should have been able to get four monitors working. But this, alas, wasn't to be. It turned out that the two Nvidia Geforce cards were somehow incompatible, and it didn't matter which one the motherboard initialized first. If the drivers for the 9400 were loaded, the drivers for the 5200 would not load. I think this will be the last time I'll be buying an Nvidia card. It's not that this makes me pleased with ATI, Nvidia's main competition; they're pissing me off by not making all the drivers for their old video cards available online, having discontinued support for some of their "obsolete" parts like a true fly-by-night hardware company (here's looking at you, Frontier Labs).
I did manage to get my four monitors working, but the solution was not ideal. I reverted to the ATI PCI-Express card (a Radeon HD 3400), which I coupled with two single-head video cards, an All-in-Wonder Rage 128 (also by ATI) and a vintage SiS 6326 that miraculously seemed to work. The Sis put out a crappy signal, but it didn't look bad on the old Gateway monitor I run at 1280 by 1024. Unfortunately, the Radeon HD 3400 didn't seem to know how to drive my ViewSonic VX2035WM at its native resolution of 1680 by 1050, though it could somehow drive it at 1600 by 1200 even though it doesn't actually have that many vertical pixels (it seems to fake those pixels through some sort of visibly-imperfect algorithm). One further downside regarding this setup is that the All-in-Wonder ignores the computer's command to power-down the monitors at the specified time, so that one monitor stays on all the time. Part of the reason I justify having four monitors on my computer is the knowledge that they power down when I walk away and are only on when I'm there. But that's only true of three of the monitors now, unless I remember to turn the fourth one off. Sometimes I fucking hate computers and the morons responsible for their imperfections, though I must admit I myself have been responsible for more than a few information technology imperfections.
Down at the greenhouse today I slapped up more Wonderboard, this time on the west wall around the glass-block windows at the wall's top. The eventual landscaping will put the top of the finished grade just below those glass blocks, though for now they are still nearly four feet above the existing grade.
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