Frankly, I think you screwed up. You should have stuck with a
conventional, dual input (DVI digital / VGA analog) 19" 4:3 1280x1024
monitor. There has been a great deal available since August on the
Hanstar (Hanspree) Hanns-G HC-194D. Basically, it's been available for
$100 to $120 after a $100 rebate. Currently, PC connection has it:
http://www.pcconnection.com/ProductDetail?Sku=6732798
It's a really great monitor. This deal ($200 to $220 with a $100
rebate) has been offered by a bunch of different retailers for typically
a couple weeks at a time ever since August. Buy.com had it for a while,
and PC Connection has had it several times. I've gotten 3 of them (each
from a different retailer), and it's a great monitor, and you can't beat
the after rebate price (even the before rebate price isn't bad). By
going "widescreen", you really painted yourself into a box as lots of
things have trouble supporting some of the widescreen resolutions.
You are also making a mistake by not upgrading to XP. XP has been
available for $49 quite a few times in the past 6 months, and it's the
best OS that MS has ever offered, BY FAR. Windows 9x drivers are not
being written for new video chips used in modern video cards, so you may
have a problem finding what you want.
Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
> Greetings all,
>
> Recently, my mother got an unexplanable urge to "upgrade" to one of
> these fancy-schamncy new flat-screen LCD monitors that everybody is
> all gaga about these days. So I foolishly volunteered to help her
> aquire one.
>
> Now, before I get to my question, I should first clarify that I don't
> know dick about *either* flat-screen monitors *or* about video cards.
> I only use computers for work, not play, I don't do "gaming" at all,
> and so in general, for my own computers, and also for the one that I
> built a few years ago for my mom, I'm still only using crusty old "tube"
> monitors and crusty old 8MB AGP 2x ATI cards. (These old/simple cards
> have the great advantage of not requiring any special drivers or other
> special fiddling in order to make them work. You just plug them in and
> they go.)
>
> I should also clarify that both I and my mother are not in the least bit
> keen to pay what I consider to be extortion money to Bill Gates,
> just for the questionable privledge of being able to run his latest
> piece-of-crap operating system. So we are both still happily using
> Windows ME, and neither of us has any desire whatsoever to make Bill
> Gates even richer by forking over ANOTHER couple of hundred bucks for
> Windows XP.
>
> So anyway, I went to newegg.com and got what I believed at the time was
> a good deal on a Viewsonic/Optiquest flat-screen 1440x900 LCD monitor,
> and I had it shipped to my mother's home... which is far far away from
> mine.
>
> She plugged it in and then called me and told me that it looked like
> crap... not even nearly as good as the flat LCD monitors that she
> had seen in stores. (This "crap look" was later verified, both by my
> bother, and also by a guy at Viewsonic tech support who said that yea,
> if you run that monitor at anything other than 1440x900, it will pro-
> bably look like crap.)
>
> Well, so I'm like totally ignorant about this stuff, so after Googling
> about all of this for a day or so, I finally understand that my mother now
> _also_ needs a new video card... i.e. probably something that was actually
> manufactured sometime later than 1998... and that whatever I buy for her
> in the way of a new video card really should know how to do a resolution
> of *exactly* 1440x900 if we want optimal results.
>
> Swell. So I get to spend more money. Now the only question is "What on?"
>
> So I go off and Google a bunch more, and I find out that *probably* the
> latest and most expensive cards that contain either ATI or Nvidia chipsets
> will support a 1440x900 resolution, but even that is uncertain, and it may
> depend upon whether or not one has paid Bill Gates the additional extortion
> money necessary to run Windows XP... which my mother hasn't (and which I
> will not allow her to do).
>
> The bottom line is that I'm searching for a card that will do 1440x900
> resolution SPECIFICALLY ON WINDOWS ME. Being basically a total cheap-
> skate, I went ahead and put in a very modest bid on a card that was listed
> on eBay as a "Radeon 9200 SE 64MB AGP" and I won it. So I'm expecting
> delivery on that soon, but I still don't even know if it will do 1440x900
> on *any* flavor of Windows, let alone on Windows ME specifically. And
> of course, ATI has arranged things so that I can't even register with
> them to get either online or telephone support until I have the card
> model#/serial#, which I don't have yet because I don't even have the card
> yet. (I'm sure that this was their intent... to keep the cheapskate
> riff-raff like me well and far away from their expensive tech support
> people.)
>
> So that's the whole story. And now y'all know why I'm here in this news-
> group today, and what I need. I'm hoping that somebody here will be kind
> enough to tell me if this "Radeon 9200 SE 64MB AGP" thing is going to be
> able to do 1440x900 on Windows ME or not. If not, then what is the
> solution to my problem? Should I send back the LCD monitor to newegg.com
> and swap it for one that doesn't have one of these "weird" wide-screen
> resolutions? (That's starting to seem like it might be the best option.)
> Or is there some card out there... i.e. *any* kind of video card... that
> (a) in compatible with an AGP 4x slot and that (b) will in fact do 1440x900
> under Windows ME, specifically.
>
> Please post any & all responses to the newsgroup. If you try to e-mail
> me a response, it may not work because I've got about 40% of the whole
> Internet walled off from my mail server at this point. (Anti-spam, ya
> know.)
>
>
> Regards,
> rfg
>
>
> P.S. Yes, I've read about this thing called "Powerstrip" and it sounds
> as if it *might* be the solution to this whole mess, but getting that
> means spending yet more money, which I am not eager to do if I can avoid
> it. More importantly however, I'm not even sure if it will do what I need
> to have done anyway, i.e. fiddling card resoutions to produce 1440x900
> under Windows ME, specifically. Can Powerstrip even do that?
>