Today I reinstalled Windows

[David Gerard]

2009/9/17 Michael Haney <thezorch at gmail.com>:

> 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.


That said, Xorg can be as bad on "legacy" hardware even if an
open-source driver exists, i.e. made before maybe 2006. Such as the
Toshiba Satellite 6050 which has an S3 chip. Can't do auto-setup,
needs an xorg.conf file. If I want this fixed, well, there's the code
and here's tips on how to get it to work ... and there are Xorg devs
seriously trying to remove any xorg.conf detection at all and have it
all autodetect or not autodetect. I realise this is part of the
painful process of dragging X11 from the 1990s to the 2010s, but ARGH.

(yes, there's a reported and open bug which I added a note too. no, it
won't practically speaking be fixed until someone fixes it upstream.)

Windows XP is sometimes actually much better-behaved on the stuff that
Linux and/or X11 has just passed by. Annoyingly.

(Mind you, the W200 wifi on this laptop, which you need to
hand-compile the Linux driver for, is an example when this is not the
case - the current Windows driver reliably bluescreens if it sees an
11n network ANYWHERE IN RANGE - you need an earlier driver if you
don't want this to happen. I'm still seriously tempted to gut the
shell and put in something RT2500-based.)


- d.