Techno-troglodyte (again)

I’m breaking the mould here, and posting about my own home techno-woes today. I finally decided to overhaul my creaking dual-boot, Windows 2K, Redhat (so old I don’t remember) into a brand-spanking shiny XP / Pick favourite Ubuntu distro here. Note that this may be waaay beyond my technical capabilities. Anyway, based on advice from our divisional Information Officer (i.e. for a dual boot, install Windows first, otherwise it @$#s up your Linux), I went ahead with my XP install.

Now my shiny new birthday pressie (Samsung SyncMaster Flatscreen) doesn’t work properly – every couple of minutes, it pops up a nasty little box saying that the resolution is not optimal, and I have to bang about with the buttons on the screen to get rid of it. So I thought – hmm, time to upgrade my video driver. And have duly spend two days searching for my video driver.

Thanks to a marvelous utility called EVEREST , I didn’t actually have to take a screwdriver to my pc case to find out what graphics card I had, but just a click of a mouse told me it was a SiS 315 Integrated (yup, that really meant a lot to me). So I searched for that, found a download, downloaded it – tried to install it, and got told it couldn’t install, as I didn’t have the driver. Checking out Control Panel -> Display properties -> Settings -> Advanced -> Adapter didn’t give me any info, as it just had some random VGA thing listed, with no properties or anything.

After much swearing, I found a forum in which the answer to almost every question was “Install the drivers for your motherboard, then try again”. So (thanks to Everest), I searched for the chipset drivers (SiS 651), found them here and installed them.  Huzzah! I now have a screen that works.  It still makes every second line fuzzy – so I’m now going to try installing the actual drivers for the monitor next.

Anyway, I’ll probably post any updates to my quest for a shiny dual-boot system on a middle-aged pc on this blog, not my usual personal ones, as I don’t think my friends are terribly interested in the ins and outs my system woes. (Plus, I’d probably have to be embarrassed if any of them realized the extent of my techno-naivete.)