September 11, 2003

• Why I Hate Windows:
  
  WARNING: SERIOUS GEEK TALK AHEAD.
  
  I have a piddlin' little Pentium 200, mostly so I can run Slackware Linux and experiment with GNUstep. It also has a Windows98 partition (a separate hard drive, actually). The other day while I was at the computer junk store, I paid $4 for a video card for this little box. A Diamond Multimedia Viper V330, a tiny incremental step up from the S3 Trio64+ motherboard video in the box.
  
  What follows is a play-by-play of my attemps to install this thing.
  
  First: Open case, install card, hook up monitor. Easy.
  
  Start up computer. Tell LILO to boot Windows, thinking there's more chance of immediate gratification than having to reconfigure XFree86 under Linux.
  
  Wrong. Windows boots to 640x480 and starts up the process of figuring out what to do with the new hardware. A handful of driver files are missing from the Win98 CD, so it never really completely installs.
  
  I go to my Mac to download a card-specific driver. What I encounter is DriverGuide.com, the most horrid tech site ever to exist. They're the only site I found to have the driver I needed, but they require registration.
  
  Registration involves the following: Giving them your email address and about ten thousand pieces of personal information. Which I faked. Then they ask you if you want to receive newsletters about the following topics... and about three web pages full of little check boxes next to various topics. Then they tell you to check your email which will contain your special personalized user account and password.
  
  I'm here to tell you, folks... The username is 'drivers' and the password is 'all.' Personalized to the max.
  
  Once you enter this special account information, and then try to download something, the web server will ask you to copy a random number off the screen into a form, which you then submit. They do this so they can keep people from doing automated downloads of their valuable marketing tool.
  
  So having walked their forced-marketing gauntlet and downloaded the driver, copied it to a floppy disk, and opened it up on the PC.
  
  So naturally, having installed it on the PC, it doesn't work. I end up back in 640x480, unable to switch to other color depths.
  
  Back to the Mac, back to Google, I discover that there's a flash ROM update available. Perhaps the driver is expecting an up-to-date ROM on the video card, and is bailing when it doesn't get it..?
  
  I was using the Mac because the network connection wasn't working on the PC, but I discovered it was a bad cable. So, in 640x480 glory, I run IE and download the ROM upgrade.
  
  This little program is the least user-friendly program ever devised, considering that end-users are supposed to use it to potentially ruin their video card. But. I'm super-user, right? First of all, it has to be run in DOS. Not a DOS shell under Windows, but DOS. So I restart yet again. After much head-scratching, I figure out that the R command line switch means 'flash the updated ROM into that thing!' So I do it. It gives me an ambiguous result notification: 'ROM update ambiguously ambiguous.'
  
  I cross my fingers. I restart the computer. Something new happens... Windows starts, but after a few moments, the screen goes black and I get an error message: 'Wrong NV chip revision for this Resource Manager.'
  
  Flash ROM upgrade error? ROMs newer than the driver? Fark.
  
  So it's off to Google again, where I eventually find that there's an incrementally newer driver out there. Rock on! sez I. I'll just download it, and install it, and all will be well!
  
  Hold on, though. After getting this NV error, Windows will only let me reboot into 'Safe Mode,' wherein I can't access the network. However, there's a 'Safe Mode with Network Access' option, wherein, again, I can't access the network.
  
  No biggie, sez me, I'll just download the thing, put it on a floppy, and sneakerNet it over to the PC (which is actually just a turn-the-chair-Net, but sneakerNet sounds so much cooler). Snag: File is too big for inclusion on a floppy. Solution: Burn a CD! Snag: Mac OS Disk Tools won't let me burn a DOS disk. Solution: Roxio Toast, CD burning software! Snag: 'Safe' mode won't recognize the CD! It won't recognize any CD, in fact.
  
  Solution: LINUX!
  
  No, really. Reboot to Linux. Edit /etc/X11/XFree86Config to use the 'nv' driver instead of the 's3' driver. 'startx.' Download the new driver from the web to the DOS partition.
  
  Reboot. In 'Safe' mode. Unpack the driver archive. Run the installer. Error message: "This installer cannot run in Safe mode."
  
  So. I remove the video driver from windows. I tell it I'm removing the card. I fool it into being less smart. I rip the old driver out like a still-beating heart, drinking the blood oozing from the attached arteries.
  
  Reboot. 640x480. Run the fucking installer. It completes. It tells me to reboot. I reboot.
  
  Error message: "Wrong NV chip revision for this Resource Manager."
  
  Linux works fine, however.

  • 1:57 am
  • 7 Comments