Bang for your buck
I really want to escape the entire world of the wintel PC altogether now. My iBook is just a flavour of clean, ordered efficiency. My PC may be powerful but jez, it’s so messy and frustrating. Not to mention depressing, I wonder how many of my personal problems I can pin down to the pc.
It only got more depressing because today I decided to put my geforce 6600gt back in so that I can see if games work. Turns out they do, and Call of Duty 2 is absolutely incredible. It was the first thing i tried, so i figured ah, the 6600 must be working again now then. But sadly it isn’t, video files’s still cause stop errors, whether i try vlc, bsplayer, or windvd. They also hang the pc even if i tell the apps not to use the video overlay (also sometimes known as hardware/video acceleration). BUT, if I boot into ubuntu and try a video in there they work.
So, the evidence…
- No problems at all if the 4200ti is plugged in instead of the 6600gt
- In windows with the 6600gt all videos, however played and in any video app hang windows.
- Games work fine, including recent hardware intensive ones irrespective of the graphic card.
- Video’s play fine in ubuntu irrespective of the card plugged in
You would conclude from the evidence that the problem lay with windows and that a fresh install would fix things. This is where it gets depressing, I’ve spent the majority of the day re-installing windows yuck. Even worse, the problem persists. So somehow the 6600gt is broken, and somehow the fault only affects video’s and only when played in Windows.
I can’t even remember where I bought the damn thing.
Will someone please buy me a nice shiny new iMac g5, the bigger one please. And take this damned beige heap of junk away with you.
