Ati Drivers?

[Son Goku]

nope, its a laptop with pci express, x700

Well, then it's sitting in a PCI-X slot. If there's a problem with the slot, it could... But I'd check the card first.

Oh, and BTW, some OEMs are that bad. I know Saz works for one, (well it's a different OEM from Acer or Gateway), so not sure what he would have to say with some of what I'm about to say. But some of these OEMs have put out crap machines, and have provided crap support.

I had a roomate, when I lived on campus who had a Gateway Pentium 133. The thing had a number of problems, but one of them was with the CD Rom drive. Now how do I know this? Because he asked to borrow some of my games, and when I got the game CDs back, they didn't look the same, as when I gave them to him They were scratch city to say the least, and looked rather damaged :down:

So I asked him about this. And what happened was his PC would crash, and when that happened, his CD drive went flippant. In the process it was scratching the CDs before he got them out I told him he couldn't borrow anymore CDs from me, till he got that addressed.

Mind you, he contacted Gateway tech support, and they sat on the whole matter and didn't do anything until 2 weeks before his computer was about to run out of warranty. At that point they sent another drive to him, and all seemed like it might be well. For about a month it was, and then another one of my CDs got scratched Mind you, I take better care of my things then that. At this point though, they waited till his warranty was about to run out, wouldn't speak with him or anything... And now, the replacement was bad.

After getting the whole spewl, I about had enough, and no warranty (as they sat their on their thumbs, almost waiting the warranty period out the first time), opened the thing up, and inserted my old SCSI card (I bought the Adaptec SCSI card 29160 when I got my hard drive in Dec. 2000), and a spare CD Rom drive I had, and just gave them to him for free. Well, he'd need the card for it, as my disk system has been all SCSI since like 1998 or so... Case solved, I wasn't about to either have this Gateway is doing... Nor was I going to have him continuing to borrow my CDs, with every single fricken one lent out comming back all scratched up

I've had some OEM nightmare stories of my own... It happens. About all I can suggest (beings it's a laptop, and I for one haven't worked in laptops, albeit I have desktops), get them to take a look at the gfx, and suggest that there's question as to the gfx card itself. If need be, continue badgering them until they get to it, and make sure they have to honor their warranty Oh, calling them on the 1-800 number, as they don't do their thing They have to pay for those calls out of their own pocket If you can replace a gfx card in a laptop, you could test that; but many people I know who have worked on desktops, won't touch laptops themselves, so... Otherwise, don't buy from them again, and try to find a better vendor the next time around

 

[Sazar]

well it shouldnt when its a laptop that almost costs 3000 dollars

If your warranty is good, they should be able to resolve the issue relatively well for you.

If not, contact a sales person and see if they can internally escalate the issue for you via forms and have someone contact you directly. Most system builders have similar procedures in place for the consumer department.

 

[Steevo]

Do what I do with Fed Ex.

"Then may I speak to your manager?"


Susan Pashby paid, and I got a nice letter.

 

[LeeJend]

ATI has been having major problems with their drivers the last 5 months. Especially anything related to multimedia. Do a complete uninstall of the ATI drivers, any "mod's" you added, and then start over. Use ccleaner to make sure it is really cleaned out.


Steevo - bad news. The "may I speak to a manager" isn't working anymore.

Support quality is dropping. I'm seeing more and more threads from people complaining about being ignored and stalled. Price of product does not seem to make a difference. They want to jerk you around so long you ditch the POS and go buy something else. They don't seem to care that they are loosing customers anymore.

Dell does seem to be an exception to the new tactics. Maybe that's why their market share is the highest? Radical concept. Keep your customers happy.

 

[Sazar]

Ati has been having major problems?

The last 2 or 3 releases have been pretty rock solid for me and performance seems to have been smoothed for my card (improved performance for newer products).

I don't know where you are getting your info from Leejend.

I know you have a thing about Ati but please don't pass on your opinion of them as fact. I don't see a lot of people complaining about the Ati products. I dislike the CCC load time but other than that I have on real complaints.

The new AIW software items are fabulous as well.

I have used their support and I have had no problems and I am far from the easiest customer to deal with.

 

[LeeJend]

I'm getting my info from ATI tech support senior technicians and tech support managers. I am only quoting ATI. I was told several times over the last 3 months. "We have known issues with SB audio cards and MB chipsets and we are working on our drivers to correct these problems. Keep trying new drivers and they might work for you." One of the ATI "non-existant" multimedia issues has shown about a 90% improvement with the last driver release but now I get noise during video gaming. The only change was adding the new ATI drivers to my system. The 3 prior ATI driver versions had no effect on removing the severe sound distortion.

My best engineering judgement based on 30 years as a Systems Integrator is that when they went to passing the sound information across the MB bus instead of using the sound card aux input they introduced problems which they are still trying to correct. The problem may be isolated to VIA chipset MB's or it may be more general. But I'm sure not going to put on my Program Manager's smile give everybody a wink and a handshake and say "What problem?".

Don't assume because your config happens to be stable that everyone else's config is.

PS I'm not down on ATI's entire product line. Only their multimedia products that were released with known compatibility issues, also the high prices for their mid-range gaming cards, but mainly with their really bad attitude on exchanges and upgrades.

We'll give you $50 for a card we admit does not work and that you just paid $300 for borders on criminal fraud. It's called bait and switch by most State Attorney Generals' Offices.

I'm willing to bet if Dell sold me a card with compatibility issues they would be more than happy to let me upgrade to another higher priced card or to a less expensive card at the same price. Dell has done this for poeple I know at work. Dell even refunded the price of an entire high end system to a friend of mine after 3 months trying to resolve a compatibility issue with audio playback. (Not ATI related.)

 

[Son Goku]

Ahem, I have had a Radeon 9600 for a few years now, and I can certainly attest to having not had problems with the Windows drivers themselves. As to the Control Center, their is also an easy solution I stumbled upon, if one wants to dispense with it.

The control center requires .net Framework 1.1. However, it will not work with .NET framework 2.0 (which in my view is rather silly). However, when I installed .NET 2.0, and then used Add/Remove programs to remove .NET 1.1 (seeing no reason to keep both versions), the ATI driver set was reverted to the old (pre-Control Center) driver tabs in display properties. If one wants rid of it, just get rid of .NET 1.1, keep .NET 2.0, and it's done...

The Linux driver set was a bit of a different story (wrt the 2.4.x kernel in the 32-bit version of Slackware 10.2). However, the ATI driver set wasn't alone here, as I didn't get all the nForce drivers to go either. Both driver sets installed fine with the 2.6.x kernel as bundled in Slamd64 (a port of Slackware Linux for the AMD-64 instruction set); though that did post some problems with software that wouldn't compile in the 64-bit environment, and wouldn't recognize the 32-bit CHroot either, if one tried to throw compiler switches to force a 32-bit compile in gcc...

The Windows drivers? Haven't seen it. This isn't to say that in the last gen, I wouldn't have necessarily gone with the 6800 GT rather then the x800 (even as I went with the Radeon 9600 rather then the 5800 FX), but still...

 

[Steevo]

I too rather like the newest ATI offering of drivers, 6.2's over my past favorite Omega Drivers, performance is the same, and stability is higher. I know this as last night after changing to the ATI drivers I got a few extra FPS with no hard system lock during OC'ing tests. A simple reboot of the graphics (automatic) card was all that was needed to continue.

My personal experiance is that when people start tweaking too much on these newer cards they run into problems. Or when people expect perfection from any setup. I could complain that I have a new system, with a top of the line graphics card and get a low score on 3Dmark06. Or that a card with 3X the pixel processing capability is almost the same price as I paid for this one.

I got more than I expected, but I did enough research to be sure that it would work togeather with little or no problems.





BTW

702 core-780 mem fan speed stays low so it is quiet, I can get more but it gets noisy. 70ish FPS, 1280X1024, 6X-16X, all high quality, HL2:Lost coast.

All on $1,700 of hardware. How can I complain?

 

[Mastershakes]

Ati has been having major problems?

The last 2 or 3 releases have been pretty rock solid for me and performance seems to have been smoothed for my card (improved performance for newer products).

I don't know where you are getting your info from Leejend.

I know you have a thing about Ati but please don't pass on your opinion of them as fact. I don't see a lot of people complaining about the Ati products. I dislike the CCC load time but other than that I have on real complaints.

The new AIW software items are fabulous as well.

I have used their support and I have had no problems and I am far from the easiest customer to deal with.

Here here. My 9600XT just keeps on getting better and better with each Omega Driver release. It overclocks itself a good 45Mhz as well.

 

[lkyng]

Here a version of Catalyst 6.2 (8.223) for graphics boards ASUS but also functioning with other marks under Win 32/64bits WHQL.

Date from the driver: 07/02/2006
Center Control: 1.2.2231.38897
WHQL: 24/02/2006
Parental ATI Control & Encoder: 3.0CD5
WDM: 1.0.0.1
Official: not
OS: Windows 2000/Xp 32/64bits

(Translated at Google French to English)

Download Station Drivers

Enjoy

 

[Steevo]

6.3's suck dick. Really.