Don't buy ATI.
For pretty much the last decade I've used both ATI and NVidia graphics products in the home PC systems I've built. Over the years my choice of which company's card I've used was the one that had the current fastest graphics card for 3D gaming. I've also used ATI for their TV tuner cards - these are provided as either an add-on "TV Wonder card", or integrated with your main video card as the "All In Wonder".
ATI is a company that has such a poor driver install experience that a cottage industry has sprung up around the issue to provide 3rd party tools that will help you clean off the crap left behind by their drivers (see "DriverCleaner"). ATI seem to be aware of this fact, since they publish knowledgebase articles that outline this lengthily step-by-step process in a sequence of knowledge base pages for their video drivers. If you want to install the drivers and software for the TV wonder functionality, that's a whole other set of knowledge base pages.
Let's compare the two driver installation experiences between ATI video cards and NVidia video cards. See if you can see the subtle difference between the two installation procedures...
| ATI | NVidia |
- Go visit each of the ATI knowledgebase
pages that give you detailed step-by-step
instructions on how you should install drivers
for your card. - Go visit the various forums on the net to find
out what the actual suggested steps are for
installing ATI drivers based on other users painful
experience. - Disable virus scan software
- Remove old driver by "removing" from the
Add/Remove programs list - Reboot possibly even in SAFE mode!
- Do your best to try to cancel Search your
system for your previous version of driver files
that Windows might try to reinstall on your next boot. - Clean off old drivers using another piece of software
like "DriverCleaner" which you would have learned about
in step #2 above. - Download new driver from ATI
- Run the installer
- Reboot
- While waiting for your system to reboot. Make sure you
sacrifice a chicken, just to be sure. - Try out all of your related software to make sure it
hasn't just been pooched by a bad driver installation. | - Download driver.
- Install driver.
- Reboot.
|
Posted
Jul 20 2007, 11:47 PM
by
Keith Reid