JY's Weblog
lundi 1 mars 2004
Even if you use a Mac, you can't escape from Windows crashes.
... because you have friends and family !
Yesterday (sunday...) i struggled on a 1 month-old Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo notebook. Basically the PC started to crash when using Word (doh!). And not a simple Word crash, no, it was causing a video card driver freeze!
Windows XP on reboot would tell me it was a crash due to the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 driver. (Note that it is not a rare and unknown video card)
So the geek in me thought "very easy, let's upgrade the video driver and voilà!".
Poor geek in me.
After downloading the driver from ATI's website (which takes a long time on a 56k modem by the way...), the setup tells me i need DirectX9. Ok cool, they could have written this in the prerequities, thank's.
Later... after downloading directX9 (long time on a modem too), ATI's setup would tell me 'unable to install, try installing a standard vga graphics display driver'. doh! And this was after i un-installed the previous ATI driver, as asked in the doc...
So I'm stuck. No idea how to escape from this Windows hell.
With a fresh new PC, using the most used software, Word, we get a video card problem!
And I have no idea how the PC owners would deal with it alone. They are new to computing and don't want to know what is a video driver.
(Note to my Mac : I love you.) 
