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Windows 2000 has a way of making simple things complicated.
I got a fancy new video card on Friday with multi-monitor support, and digital video out for my new flat-screen monitor. Installing a new video card should be a fairly simple process, right? Plug in the new card, fire up the computer and install the drivers when prompted.
The first problem I had was with the system BIOS. It initially complained about the new card and, after fifteen minutes of tweaking and spontaneous reboots, it arbitrarily wiped all of its own settings and made me reconstruct everything from scratch. I don't suppose I can rightly blame Win2K for that one, though. Thanks IBM.
On Friday I spent the better part of two hours fighting Win2K, trying to get it to recognize the new hardware and drivers. I ran a series of cycles through both safe mode and regular mode, enduring system hangs and spontaneous reboots before I finally managed to get a working display on one of the two monitors in regular mode. Thirty minutes later I had a reasonably functional system with dual monitors.
This morning when I rebooted, things started to fall apart again. The software that came with the video card stopped recognizing the second monitor, and its display was rotated 270 degrees. Hmph. After a bit of work, I managed to get Win2K to stop recognizing the drivers. Actually I can't really claim credit for that - Win2K managed to do that on its own. I took another trip to the world of Safe Mode, and after removing the devices and reinstalling the drivers off the network (that is, Windows did that for me without prompting), I managed to achieve nothing. I downloaded the drivers from the manufacturer's website and installed those. While I was at it, I also un-installed the utilities that came with the monitor. All told it was about 90 minutes of work.
I don't know if it was the drivers, or the monitor utilities that were at fault, but it is finally working - or at least it's stable; quirky, but stable.
It should not take 3 1/2 hours to install a video card.
I got a fancy new video card on Friday with multi-monitor support, and digital video out for my new flat-screen monitor. Installing a new video card should be a fairly simple process, right? Plug in the new card, fire up the computer and install the drivers when prompted.
The first problem I had was with the system BIOS. It initially complained about the new card and, after fifteen minutes of tweaking and spontaneous reboots, it arbitrarily wiped all of its own settings and made me reconstruct everything from scratch. I don't suppose I can rightly blame Win2K for that one, though. Thanks IBM.
On Friday I spent the better part of two hours fighting Win2K, trying to get it to recognize the new hardware and drivers. I ran a series of cycles through both safe mode and regular mode, enduring system hangs and spontaneous reboots before I finally managed to get a working display on one of the two monitors in regular mode. Thirty minutes later I had a reasonably functional system with dual monitors.
This morning when I rebooted, things started to fall apart again. The software that came with the video card stopped recognizing the second monitor, and its display was rotated 270 degrees. Hmph. After a bit of work, I managed to get Win2K to stop recognizing the drivers. Actually I can't really claim credit for that - Win2K managed to do that on its own. I took another trip to the world of Safe Mode, and after removing the devices and reinstalling the drivers off the network (that is, Windows did that for me without prompting), I managed to achieve nothing. I downloaded the drivers from the manufacturer's website and installed those. While I was at it, I also un-installed the utilities that came with the monitor. All told it was about 90 minutes of work.
I don't know if it was the drivers, or the monitor utilities that were at fault, but it is finally working - or at least it's stable; quirky, but stable.
It should not take 3 1/2 hours to install a video card.