Sorry, Just have to let it out: new HW stinks.

[Tomasz]

Gurm is right, the newest catalysts (2.3) provided a noticable improvement in the WinXP GUI (both in IQ and in dragging/scrolling performance -all is much more crisp).

In my experience, the 8500 128MB has been a great card... for a very nice price (less than half the price of a Parhelia oem a few months ago). I have tested it with plenty of games and have had very few problems...

[rubank]

And as I already said, I tested both the latest Catalyst as well as the latest O/P, no blessing in sight.


And I´ll take my grievances one step further:
Isn´t it a shame, a really awful one, that neither Ati nor nVidia can produce an uninstall feature that deletes everything introduced by installing their drivers?
How hard can that be?

I don´t know about Matrox now, but they had one before.

rubank

[Dogbert]

Rubank, here's another option:

Uninstall XP and get Win2k instead.

WinXP seems to be the WinME of the NT series.

[Novdid]

Couldn't agree with you more Dogbert, go with W2K instead rubank.

[Gurm]

Nah WinXP is superior to Win2k in every way... except memory footprint.

- Gurm

[K6-III]

...and security...and RAID/SCSI performance....

[Indiana]

and annoying "extra-features" (as M$ would like to put it). Oh, and missing hardware support for even more legacy hw than Win2k. Try most older scanners e.g.

[Gurm]

Yuk. Most older scanners it was a total kluge to get them working in the first place. Yuk. If they're SCSI, support is built in. If not, get a new scanner, dammit. It's not more than $50.

RAID performance _IS_ a big mystery. Why is it so poor? Nobody knows.

- Gurm

[Dogbert]

Sorry, I have a Umax Vista S6E and it won't work under 2k. Umax won't supply drivers for 2k.

Never buying Umax again.

[rubank]

Originally posted by Gurm
...
RAID performance _IS_ a big mystery. Why is it so poor? Nobody knows.

- Gurm

They had to slow it down in order to monitor your behavioral pattern


rubank

[DGhost]

according to Microsoft one cause of the poor scsi/raid performance comes from the fact they enabled stricter rules for caching to be enabled. most controllers were simply enabling caching (or reporting to windows that caching should be enabled) without doing any real tests.

UMAX scanners are pretty bad.

K6-III, acctually, last i checked XP is more secure OOB than Windows 2000 is... it at least has a fair amount more security features...

[PeTe]

2D @ Radeon 8500's [ atleast ATI's ] is more than sufficient. You REALLY need a GOOD monitor to see the difference.

Im using a Sony 21" F520 with my Radeon 8500LE and 2048x1536 is usable, but the LE's cant do 85Hz on that resolution and the font size on some web-pages that wont scale on the large font size are just bit too damn small for my liking. So using 1920x1440@85Hz.

You should remember that ALL current 9700's are MADE by ATI [ well .. saphire actually ]. First NON BB-ATI card is Hercules [ reason why you havent seen any of those yet ]. So get that Connect3D radeon 9700 if its ANY cheaper than ATI-card. The 2D picture is EXACTLY the same on ALL Radeon 9700's since the 2D filters are integrated on the CORE. Good call on ATI, no more worries on 3rd party crappy picture.

And in the last couple days those 8X-motherboards had a BIOS updates that actually remove most of the problems with Radeon 9700's. And if you dont have a AGP8X mobo, you are safe. If i had the money [ after buying that Sony.. ] i would really consider a 9700 since the jaggies REALLY show on 21". That Sony is too damn sharp. But because my system is bit outdated anyways im going for R350/R400. A 1.35G TB + KT133 just isnt enough to get the best performance out of a 9700 but its enough for 8500.

PeTe

[Lucid]

Originally posted by Dogbert
Sorry, I have a Umax Vista S6E and it won't work under 2k. Umax won't supply drivers for 2k.

Never buying Umax again.

Have you looked at this?

http://www.umax.com.au/xp_ok.html#s6e

When I gave my old Umax Astra 600S to my dad, I noticed there were no official drivers for Win2k, but I did find unofficial ones from some "hidden" support page

[Dogbert]

Cool, thanks !

[Fred H]

Isn´t it a shame, a really awful one, that neither Ati nor nVidia can produce an uninstall feature that deletes everything introduced by installing their drivers?

Did you try this?

http://www.mywebattack.com/gnomeapp.php?id=104835

Not an ATI, nVidia, Matrox driver remover, but still...

Fred H