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Good Morning My computer has phases in and out of various variants of the Blue Screen of Doom and the Deadly Loop, so this update may take a while... I got a £70 top-end AGP 8x interface graphics card. A good price, I'd say, knowing it's a 512MB GDDR3 ATI card. So I attached this replacement onto my motherboard and booted for the first time. It failed - in fact came up with just a blank screen. So I looked on the box and checked the spec requirements. Everything was fine, I thought. Then I checked the power requirement - 450W. My PSU could only supply 350W. I rectified it quickly and booted again. For about four weeks I could safely say I had such an outstanding graphic experience I would not stop going on about it. A crystal-clear picture rolled smoothly among the pixels like I'd never believed. Games that I'd previously had to set the graphic options to lowest for used to lag, even with those options set. But now, with such a powerful piece of circuitry, I could both internally and externally (for I had Catalyst Control Centre) overdrive those options to the very highest! I thought it was unparallelled. By now, it was the summer. I redecorated my room and stripped down the old, peeling, cracky wallpaper from the walls. A couple of layers of matte green finish with a stripe of white now occupies that space. I booted Windows Vista like usual after this seven-day job. The inevitable happened: Vista reported a fatal error. It read: "CCC.exe has stopped working." At first, I just passed this and put it to one side and played a game. Lag? Bad graphics? No textures? I wondered what was going on. Then I realised that CCC.exe was the Catalyst Control Centre. I thought that if it couldn't load that, it wouldn't be able to load the driver for my card either. Unluckily for me, I was correct. I couldn't play any games like I could before if the graphics couldn't even be rendered. But why would the card malfunction like this all of a sudden? I blamed one of the games or programmes I installed. I reinstalled Windows and installed nothing but the initial drivers. For about a week it rolled fine, with no errors. I began to install games and applications and restarted between each one. Still going good. By this point, I was hopeful that the CCC.exe error was just a one-off. But I still believed there was a reason. So I played a game. Great graphics, full rendering, smooth gameplay, but it didn't last. The next time I booted Windows, a dialog box came up with that dreaded error message: "CCC.exe has stopped working." Some impulse told me to try it again. This time, after reinstalling Windows and the graphics driver, it came up with the BSoD. I tried to repair the damage in Safe Mode and rebooted. I hit the power button after discovering it was in a Deadly Loop! I finally believed there was no two ways about this, but it could be worse. I could have got that card working only to find my RAM and CPU bottlenecked it, and had no benefit for the performance of my computer. So I decided to give up and go backwards. I replaced by old card back in this turbopowered (750W PSU, not otherwise) machine and went along with it. The extra power supplied by the power supply (obviously) seemed to prove useful. In the past, I recollect the OS lagging when about three applications are open and I try to listen to music or watch a video. Now it just motors ahead no matter how many programmes are open (but I don't have many.) I don't know the correlation; it may just be me. But in the end, it's a step forward, so I'm glad about it. Thanks for reading. WI |
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