Catching up?

I sold that PS3 on eBay. I ended up making about $250 profit on it. Wow. The market crashed really quickly. I would have been better off buying Wii's and selling them on eBay. They are fetching a nice profit right now. War Santa Claus.

I've been having one heck of a time at home with Vista and my gaming PC. Sheesh. I'm up and running now, but listen at what I had to go through.

I bought two 22" widescreen LCD's. They kick butt and have a ton of connections on the back, including an HDMI port. I'm running an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB card in my system. It has DVI and VGA out. The monitor hooked up to the DVI port rocked the house. The monitor hooked up to the VGA didn't look so hot. I _had_ to get another video card with DVI to power this thing.

I got desperate. So, I headed down to the local Wal-Mart and bought a Visiontek Radeon 9250 256MB PCI card for about $70. In less than 15 minutes I had left my office, driven to Wal-Mart, bought the card, returned home, and had it installed and powering the second LCD. Yippie!

I booted up Window XP Pro and it worked like a champ. Dual DVI-powered 22" LCD's were rocking the house at 3200 x 1050.

However, at the time I was dual booting into the final build of Vista Ultimate. This is where the problems began. Neither monitor would work. After re-installing Vista 5 times, I finally found out that for some reason or another the Radeon 9800 Pro card (my primary display adapter) needed to pump out through the VGA connection instead of the DVI connection. So, that's fine now, I guess. I've got one monitor working. I tried connecting the VGA connection on the Radeon 9250 to the second LCD, but it wouldn't work at all. WTF?

As it turned out, Microsoft decided that it wouldn't support the 9250 video card in Vista. No love. The card that I just bought wouldn't work with Windows Vista.

So, a few weeks later back to Wal-Mart I went to return the video card. Ok. $70 in my pocket and no second video card to drive the second LCD.

What I needed was a video card that Vista will support that had to be PCI. My motherboard doesn't have any PCI-Express slots. It had to be PCI. As it turns out, there are only a handful of PCI cards that meet Vista's requirements. Furthermore, there was no one in north Alabama that sold such a card. I mean, not many people sell PCI cards. If they do, they are low end cards that aren't good enough for Vista.

So, I head to CrapUSA with my $70 to buy another video card. I found a GForce Something or Another card. Sweet. It's PCI. It says on the box it would run Vista. Having been around town and looking around, this must be the only card that would meet the specs and fit in my PCI slot. But, this is an nVidia card. I run ATI in my system. Will my system run both an nVidia PCI card and an ATI AGP card? CompUSA said "No way will that work". Best Buy's "Nerd Squad" said, "Sure it'll run no problem". Hmm. Desperate. What to do?

I bought the nVidia card hoping that the Nerd knew his motherboards.

I got home and just as I started to open my new purchase I see on the bottom of the box "VGA + VGA + S-video out". Holy crap. This card doesn't have a DVI port. I didn't even try to install this thing into my system. After 3 hours of driving around north Alabama looking for a video card and thinking I found a solution, I didn't even have a card that met my first requirement "Have a DVI slot". Sheesh. That card has since been returned to CrapUSA.

It was about 2PM by that time. I hopped onto Buy.com and found an ATI Radeon x1300 for $120, $100 after Google Checkout, and $80 after a $20 mail-in-rebate. Not too bad. Next day shipping $20. Hmm. That was Friday. Will they really deliver this by the next day...Saturday?

You bet they did. By 10AM the next morning I had a brand new video card on my doorstep. Nice job Buy.com. Way to ship stuff.

In went the video card into my machine. Vista boots up just fine and finds the new card.

But crap. Vista's new Aero interface was struggling. WTF? I've got two 256MB cards in the system. Why wouldn't Aero run smoothly? It ran super fast during the Vista beta.

So that's where I am. Aero is not running on my system right now. When it isn't running, the system smokes. With Aero enabled, the 9800 and x1300 chug. Perhaps it's the beta Catalyst drivers from ATI?

Oh well. Gears of War is still keeping me entertained.

Merry Christmas. More later.