A NASTY LESSON

                      By Stefan Herber

My general trend in recent years has not been to buy a brand new
computer every time I can afford it but to upgrade when and if
funds are available - which usually means, thanks to the game
purveyors, every 18 months or so. I bought Windows XP as soon as
it came out only to find it was incompatible with my then version
of AOL. Nice of AOL and Microsoft to warn us in advance, wasn't
it?  Things never worked as smoothly afterwards so it was time to
upgrade - a new very fast processor (AMD 1800), a new soundcard
(SB Audigy) and a new video card (Geforce 3 Tornado).

But - now nothing would work properly. Yes I managed to get
through some games but more and more wouldn't load or run
smoothly. So - the latest drivers were downloaded, the game
patches were downloaded and I was spending all my time staring at
the download screen. Finally one day Windows '98 wouldn't run at
all leaving me in a severe dilemma. To format the hard drive or to
download XP in the vain hope things would work? I tried the latter
as the least drastic solution.

Of course this did not go smoothly - all the software had to be
reloaded and a number of special drivers located on the net.  But
finally - it worked - or so I thought. My video card was not
recognised and no amount of latest patches was having any effect.
So none of the games would run.

So - what to do? I had found it odd that the card was recognised
by the machine as a Nvidia not the actual make. I therefore let
Windows do the work and put in the universal drivers card that
came with the machine and had been used by my work colleague whose
knowledge of computers and their workings put me to shame.

Lo and behold - it found another driver on the disc that worked!
It warned me that it was not necessarily XP compatible, but what
the Hell.


Result - games run smoothly, other games that wouldn't load now do
etc. OK it's early days but suddenly I'm optimistic.

MORAL - whoever upgrades your computer or who sells you one ready
made double check that you have the right drivers.  Clearly all
Geforce 3 drivers are not the same.













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