Today I reinstalled Windows

[Michael Haney]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 11:02 AM, Gilles Gravier <ggravier at fsfe.org> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Odd wrote:
>> Gilles Gravier wrote:
>>
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>> David Gerard wrote:
>>>
>>>> And you don't have the hardware driver dance in Linux! Either it's
>>>> completely supported ... or you're buggered ;-p
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Not true. On some older NVIDIA boards, the default driver supporting
>>> NVIDIA gives a fuzzy display
>>>
>>
>> Which means you're buggered. ;)
>>
> That's what happens when running Ubunut on legacy hardware...
>>
>>> and you have to then go and get a different
>>> driver from NVIDIA... and the very latest NVIDIA drivers don't support
>>> the older chipsets, so you have to hunt around for an older driver.
>>>
>>
>> So not buggered? ;)
>>
>> Are there no open source drivers for those chipsets?
>>
> None that are optimized... and given that the hardware isn't that
> fast... you WANT optimized drivers. :)
>>> (Toshiba Tecra M2) :)
>>>
>>
>> 2004 vintage. ;)
>>
>
> Yep!
>

Its worse if you have a strictly OEM Nvidia chipset.  My laptop has an
Nvidia Geforce 900M/610M nForce chipset, which is OEM only meaning the
Nvidia website DOES NOT offer the drivers for download.  The drivers
Acer put into this Aspire 4520 date back to Fred Flintstone's era and
to this date they still haven't update a single driver on their site.
I had all sorts of system crash problems involving the Nvidia drivers
until I got updated ones from laptopvideo2go.com with modified .INF
files so I could install them.  Now I'm stable and haven't had a video
related crash since.  Interestingly enough, while Acer hasn't updated
any of the drivers for this machine, Windows Update has updated the
Wi-Fi and Ethernet drivers on this machine several times.

-- 
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
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