[ubuntu-uk] Hardware failure?

[Rob Beard]

Seif Attar wrote:

> Rob, I dont know why, for some reason I assumed that there is no
> warranty on the thing, I contacted the seller, my warranty runs out in
> november! and he told me I can either send the whole pc to him, or
> just the motherboard and cpu if I am sure it's one of them that is
> faulty (which I will be after testing the PSU). so at least I know I
> won't be paying for a new cpu or motherboard if they are broken.
> 

That's good.

> As I mentioned earlier, I was annoyed by how loud my GPU fan is, and
> decided to go for a passively cooled one. I got an ATI because as i
> recall AMD have opened their drivers and I thought they are working
> great. I can't get Xv to work on the video card, there are some
> reports of success on the net, but I've had enough fiddling around,
> I'll return it and just buy a vga cooler for my nvidia card. but AMD
> should be ashamed that they still haven't sorted out their drivers!
> 

Actually NVidia are worse than AMD as they haven't released any source 
code for their cards, just proprietary drivers.  From what I understand, 
AMD have only recently (in the past couple of months) released technical 
documentation from which drivers can be made so unless you go for an 
oldish card you're probably going to find patchy support, but the thing 
is, eventually it'll get better.

My Radeon X300 card has fairly reasonable support but my Radeon 
All-In-Wonder X800 has pretty lousy support (none of the All In Wonder 
features work at all, saying that, they don't work on Vista either :-)

Rob