[FrYGuY]

(This will be funny. Laugh.)

So, I had for a long time a nVidia TNT2 with 32 MB of RAM. Yes, you read that properly. I had a card in my desktop which predates the entire GeForce line.

Unfortunately, as a poor college student, somebody got me Doom 3. The bastards! My processor is fast enough, my RAM is bountiful enough, I've enough disk space for a small country, but my video card was sorely lacking.

So, I use what birthday and Christmas money I can scrounge together, and buy myself an ATi Radeon 9550. As an added bonus, the thing has TV out so I can finally use my Computer as a proper video player, without having to huddle around my monitor.

I install it, and all works well. I am content. I try it out on the TV... the picture is clear, but it's in Black and White. Odd, but oh well. That wasn't a big deal anyway, and I'll figure out what's up in the morning.

Morning comes, and there was a power outage the night before. That means my computer needed booting (It's the only time the poor box gets reset!). And, as it starts up... I'm plagued with invalid memory errors, improper file errors, and delayed write failure errors. What is this? What could this be? Could my new video card which I've shelled out the last of my hard-mooched money be incompatible with some other motherboard component? Say it ain't so!

So I'm told by a friend that Radeons and Via chipsets don't play well together, and often will cause the errors I see. Well, I didn't think I had any Via chipsets, but I wasn't quite sure. A quick glance over my Mobo didn't reveal any, and I didn't recall any in the specs. But whatever, a quick swap of vid cards, back to the stoneage, and check. Nope, no Via chipsets. So, maybe my Intel IDE controller has the same problem, and lo and behold, there is an updated driver! I update, check, and all seems well! I restart, and all seems ill! Same problems.

So I swap out yet again. In all the swapping, I notice a jumper on the card which was rather inconspicuous: (NTSC / PAL), and it was set to PAL. Well, dang. That explains the stupid Black and White! I'd have never seen that when it got locked into it's steel case prison...

Back to the problem at hand, I find out that there is a setting deep within Windows that will optimize memory for either program, or system cache. It turns out that Radeons do not like it being optimized for system cache. Surely this can't be it... but alas, the system has indeed been setup like this (Not the default... I must've tweaked it when setting it up). Swap out again, test, and it's all good. A quick boot again, and it's indeed still all good.

And thus ends the tale of the Radeon 9550. Endless hairpulling which had the nice end result of fixing a problem I'd have never caught otherwise (The NTSC/PAL jumper).

Next week, I'll share a friend's story of installing a simple (Or so it seems!) game on a Mac!