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My perfectly good laptop is now rendered a piece of crap, thanks to AMD. The video card won't stretch/scale the desktop to the lcd screen... instead making it 2/3rds the normals size.
AMD states that they will not fix this bug in thier software, and have no intentions of ever even looking into it.
MORAL: If you have a DirectX9-based ATI graphics device... DON'T INSTALL WINDOWS 7!!!
Here's the perfect thread that explains the situation and the last post on the 2nd page sums up AMD's stance.
Gotta love closed standards shite.
Actually AMD's Linux drivers are the reason I originally split windows and linux on to separate machines, and ultimately why I wont have an ATI in any of my machines.....do love AMD processors though. The difference is that in Linux, someone has hacked together open source, and working drivers for ATI cards, just too late to save me from joining the Green Team forever. Currently using a GTX280 (winbox) and an 8600GT (linux box).
Rian wrote: Try Vista?
Worse, but might work for that AMD crap...
Don't have an OS reboot disk for vista... plus it would have to be a clean install and really don't want to go through that mess.
Strange thing though, it won't resize properly on the laptops lcd, however it will if I hook it up to a monitor. Go figure.
Also I put in Windows 7 three weeks ago, and it ran fine. However, I disconnected the battery to take apart the laptop, as it needed a good cleaning, and low and behold the problem arose... by disconnecting the battery?
This laptop will most likely become a pc now for my kids. They could use the upgrade I suppose.
Chris Nash wrote:
EdelBrock wrote: DON'T INSTALL WINDOWS 7!!!
Good advice. Thanks :)
Windows 7 so far is head and shoulders above XP... and without the crappy Vista bogging down of the system (and stupid requests to see if you wanted to do the action you were trying to do).
I like the shiny stuff Windows 7 adds to the desktop. Its hard going back to either XP or Vista once I've been spoiled with 7.
Doctor? wrote: Gotta love closed standards shite.
Actually AMD's Linux drivers are the reason I originally split windows and linux on to separate machines, and ultimately why I wont have an ATI in any of my machines.....do love AMD processors though. The difference is that in Linux, someone has hacked together open source, and working drivers for ATI cards, just too late to save me from joining the Green Team forever. Currently using a GTX280 (winbox) and an 8600GT (linux box).
I'll be staying away from ATI from now on. There's alot of finger pointing. ATI claims its the OEMs fault, as laptop driver updates should come through them. OEM blames it on Windows for not having old hardware drivers in the system. Windows blames it on ATI as that's where the hardware originated from.
Personally, ATI should have a generic download available to solve the issue. How can OEM give an updated driver if AVI doesn't even have one right?
I'll be looking towards different video drivers on the next laptop... which brand is best?
EdelBrock wrote: I'll be looking towards different video drivers on the next laptop... which brand is best?
AMD/ATI have been complete bollocks for years now so I'm not surprised at their total disregard for creating a proper Windows 7 driver. I only owned about one ATI card and was surprised to see them shoe-horning advertisements into their driver interfaces. No wonder they died a death to be honest.
Nvidia were voluntarily coming out with (test) drivers for Windows 7 before the first Beta version of the operating system itself became available early last year. They tend to be way ahead of the curve in that regard. The Nvidia drivers are generally very reliable and configurable for gaming and the like. I've owned something like six or seven Nvidia graphics cards in the space of a decade and didn't have one issue I couldn't solve with an eventual driver update.
To make things simpler they also use UDA (Unified Driver Architecture) which means you don't have to scour their website to download a specific driver for your specific graphics card. One file fits all once you've selected the operating system you run and in your case it's Windows 7 32-bit I assume?.
Try the ATI Vista drivers and see if they help on your current Win7 setup. Vista and 7 share a lot of common OS architecture features.
Windows 7 is fantastic 
running it on three of my own PCs and a laptop. Breathed new life in terms of speed and simply how good it looks. Everyone was fucking sick of XP after almost a decade so it's very welcome.
AMD CPU's are preferred here. I bought an Intel last time, because I was sick of Intel fanboys blaming every problem I had on my CPU (like any CPU does anything but add 1's to 0's). The 2.4GHz Q6600 clocked at 3.5GHz (in fairness, the best I ever beat out of an AMD was 3.4), and is SERIOUSLY sluggish.....once it bothers to DO anything at all, it's fast as fuck, it's just waiting on it to actually start. Built another couple of machines with Intels for others, and ALL their Quadcores do this shit. Built a couple of AMD boxen for poorer people (intels cost fuckloads more), and it was like a breath of fresh air...."see how I click the button and the machine responds without a committee meeting Batman" Still can't see how it's CPU related, it must be in (all) intel quad supporting chipsets (Or in Macroshafts CPU microcode drivers, because it's a lot snappiER in Linux).
Nvidia cards beat ATI's to death.....although they can sometimes perform very well, and certainly offer more bang for buck, their drivers in every OS are spectacularly buggy, painful, and no fun at all to use. The only Nvidia product I would avoid is their intel chipsets......I had an Asus StrikerII Extreme, and as well as being bonkers and unstable, with massive FSB range holes....it basically just turn electricity in to heat. When it finally went dead I replaced it with a gigabyte board with an Intel made chipset......infinitely cooler, and actually stays stable. Their AMD chipsets USED to be good, but I dunno about now.
Windows7 is a big step forward, it wont be long before it catches Linux in terms of hardware support and interface design (it takes MS AGES to nick KDE and Compiz's ideas and even longer to make them work in the legacy environment). It's almost there already in terms of ease of installation....although it takes far too long and you get exactly 1 broken web browser, 1 unfit mail client, a media player that can't and a couple of desktop wallpapers, in about 20GB, not quite the 3000 odd programs you can get on a 1GB linux usb boot drive) But sheeple will keep using it cos they have no choice. Good. If they ever changed Linux to suit fucktards who pay PurpleWorld 1500 quid for a 300 quid machine....I'd have to switch to FreeBSD (or Expensive OSX as the discapples of Jobs call it)
PS I only have 7 on a Vmware virtual machine because the crack uses Grub (the linux bootloader), and I've already got Grub installed and don't want to fuck it up. Oddly though it took 15mins to install on a (naturally very limited) virtual machine using VMware to do the install....but takes over an hour on the same hardware in native mode????????????? Proof positive that MS make it pause for a few mins every now and then to make you think you're gettin something. Laptop is now Ubuntu, XP and mainly Gentoo Desktops are now XP+Ubuntu and Gentoo+Ubuntu No vista currently as my SSD is only 64GB, so I can only have XP OR Pishta OR 7....will use Linux to manage which is in place once I get round to installing Pissta and getting a good crack of 7.
One of the reasons I changed over to 7 is because both Vista machines in the house when wacky.
Personally I think MS put a major bug in the last update of Vista for a planned obsolesce... Vista already has a bad name, so not like it harms MS... but it gets loads of people to purchase the new OS and gets MS to stop service of the crap OS.
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