Announcement

**Elie** · 3 January 2000, 23:59

Try to stay cool fish

Drivers a comming soon.

Cheers,
Elie

**coolfish** · 4 January 2000, 10:18

It's hard, very hard, to stay cool. My experience with the whole RR-G scene has been pretty bad so far. Dealing with their tech support people, who had no idea about this 0.5Amps at -5V,-12V, thing. The fact they sent me two RR-G's instead of one (the bill almost gave me a heartattack lemme tell ya. ) and now this, buggy drivers.

"New drivers, coming soon". We've heard that from Matrox before haven't we. Take a look at the drivers for NT, they are still in Beta.. and then what about when we upgrade to Win2000 (from what I hear, seriously worth it. It's a much more stabler, faster, OS). How long are you willing to wait for Win2000 drivers?

I don't think we should have to put up with this. Matrox has a problem with their driver dept. and I think it's up to their clients to put the lean on them to fix it.

Do you have an actual date for the new drivers?

**This_Idiot** · 4 January 2000, 14:48

Hi Coolfish,

I know, it gets annoying doesn't it? The old hands here have been through this hoop so many times that they can probably tell you the story backwards.

Forget NT, it was never part of Matrox plans and was specifically excluded from all their sales literature and product packaging. If their driver team gets some time off from time to time I guess that they may pick it up from time to time. I think that Win2K will be a different ball game, as by the end of the year it will be far too big for Matrox to ignore.

None of us will get an idea of driver release dates until they are released. I doubt that even Haig knows these days !

Dya know how much I like bringing good news ?

**Questor** · 4 January 2000, 21:29

The one thing that gets me is that Matrox knows the 1.51 drivers are bad, and cause this problem. Yet they offer no workaround or temporary patch to get users going. Yes there is a "non" matrox workaround by using another codec, but this was never a recommendation from Matrox, I had to dig it out on my own from here and other sources. Tech's answer was to send the boards back for a refund. Now as these boards continue to ship, the problem still exists, and the customers with unusable hardware is adding up. Bad bad bad…

**coolfish** · 4 January 2000, 23:39

exactly. matrox is shooting itself in the foot, and i hate to see a company that does put out great products on occassion (g400) to screw itself (and it's end users) over..

i think we should let them know that they aren't doin any good by leaving crap drivers out there..

**Brian Ellis** · 5 January 2000, 06:09

Chris

Do you really think Win 2000 will take off like that? Taking the main markets for O/Ss:

1. The WIN 95/98 users, especially home and small business users: it is far too big and cumbersome and lacks drivers.

2. The corporate users: over half of them use WIN 95, some 98 for their PCs (even my bank uses 98 on the tellers' terminals). These haven't even switched over to NT, so few will want to use 2000. Of the others, 2/3 are using either NT 3 (in flavours) or 4 (ditto) in about equal proportions. These guys are not going to rush into 2000 until it has been thoroughly beta tested and debugged by the few real corporate users who are willing to chance their arms on a virgin MS product. This will take at least a good year from next month's launch date. (Look how NT4 was slow to start). The remainder are using various flavours of UNIX, such as Linux, which is eating inexorably into MS's corporate cabbage patch, and other O/Ss.

If I were Matrox, I'd be thinking seriously more to Linux than 2000.

My crystal ball tells me that W2000 will start to show considerable sales only from 2001 onwards, as the corporate world slowly updates its computers to something that can profit from it, which the average 3-year old machine cannot.

------------------
Brian (the terrible)

**coolfish** · 5 January 2000, 07:32

woh, Linux? You can't be serious. Linux has a much longer way to go before it's adopted by home users before they consider going to Win2k. Linux lacks the gaming industry's support right now, and imo, has much less driver support than even win2k. (FYI there are 4 Linux boxen running in my house right now).

Win2k is fast, *extremely easy*, and you can BET that MS will make sure the driver support is there. On the other hand, even Corel Linux is more difficult to use, harder to install (than win2k), lacks built-in support for many cards and whatnot.

Someone's gotta be the devil's advocate in this one.

**Brian Ellis** · 5 January 2000, 09:52

Yeah! But when WIN 98 is replaced by WIN 2001 Lite or whatever it will be called, and nobody can use it without a serious update of their computers, then don't you think Linux will be able to cope? The Linux user base is expanding faster than NT/2000, now, and you can get drivers for most things, even Matrox graphics cards (but not video,TTBOMK).

------------------
Brian (the terrible)

**Elie** · 5 January 2000, 10:23

Linux will never become a mainstream OS let me tell you this much.

You have the majority using the windows OS whether it's 95/98 or NT because it's very easy to use.
With Linux, you need to be a Unix guru just to install a soundcard, everything you do you need to recompile the kernal???????
To use the CD rom you first have to mount the device etc. how many people you think know how to do that?
I agree Linux is a great OS but it's not for everyone, and I don't think companies should invest too much of their time/resources on Linux when 90% of the users are running Windows.

PS: Don't under estimate the power of Win2K

Elie

**This_Idiot** · 5 January 2000, 12:52

Hehe

Well Brian, looks like the world jumped in while I was drawing my breath.

Bear in mind that MS stated aim that Win2K will be the end of the seperate "consumer" products (W95,98) and the "corporate" products (NTx). I haven't had the "privilege" of playing with W2K, so I can't comment on how easy/resilient etc it is or how available drivers will be (although the world and his wife has been producing WDM drivers for the last 18 months).

But when every new PC sold in the world has a copy of W2K installed, you better believe that it is going to have a MAJOR effect on the marketplace. Especially with the marketing departments of our favourite hardware producers who can smell a major trend a mile away and who have never heard of Unix (wasn't that something that died out in the 70's) or Linux (wasn't he one of the characters in that strip cartoon) let alone BeOS.

It doesn't matter how crap it is, it's how the heavywights read its future performance. Frightening isn't it, "our lives in their hands"........

**andrei** · 5 January 2000, 16:29

Can Windows 2000 deliver for games ?

Loyd Case, Gamespot.

**Elie** · 5 January 2000, 18:19

Hi andrei,

Windows 2000 is still beta as he states in his review, so I wouldn't worry too much about it until Win2000 is released.
I just recieved the final version today so I'm gonna check it out myself.

Cheers,
Elie

**andrei** · 5 January 2000, 18:58

Hi Elie,

I don't think I'll rush into buying Win2k so quick, it's pricy and for some good months (hope they don't turn into many or even a year or two) it won't offer such a good experience with games . I'll leave you and Maggi to do the "beta testing" for me.

I just hope they don't drop support for Win 98 in an atempt to promote Win2k.

**Elie** · 5 January 2000, 19:26

Well Win98's replacement OS isn't Windows 2000 so your lucky

Win98's replacement is called Windows Millennium which is based on the Win95 kernel but will have more enhancements, due sometime 1st quarter 2000.
I see allot of people migrating to Win Millennium and NLE's/3D animators going the Win2K route.

We'll see what happens.

Regards,
Elie

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