To me, the only company that had a real good driver installation was 3DFX
(towards the end). It took care of everything.
I'm really surprised how many people are installing new drivers without
uninstalling the old ones. At one time you had to uninstall, reboot, install
standard vga driver, reboot, install new driver. Now you can skip the middle
step in some OS's.
You don't have to read the instructions, this is common knowledge. It's not
some strange thing that you only have to do with ATI cards, you have to do
it with all brands. Common knowledge, things you just should know, like
which side of a DVD goes up when you put it in your player. (For using the
DVD example, I apologize to my wife, who volunteered to wash a dirty, rental
DVD that wouldn't play, and washed the picture side.) Also, you should close
all running programs, but at the very least, turn off your anti-virus
software while installing new programs or drivers. If you have Kensington
mouse drivers installed, Kensington recommends uninstalling them before
installing any new programs or Service Paks, and then reinstalling them. ( I
learned this the hard way, too.)
Download the new driver. When the download finishes, click 'open folder'.
Drag a shortcut to your desktop.
Click Add/Remove programs, uninstall the old drivers, reboot, click on the
shortcut and install the new driver. It doesn't take 5 minutes.
Here's what can happen. New drivers have different files and filenames, so
when you install new drivers over old ones, not all the old files are
overwritten. Some are left behind. At the very least, I'd think you'd want
to get rid of files that you no longer need on your computer and keep your
hard drive clean.
Once you've installed the new drivers, there's no way to uninstall the old
ones. Add/Remove programs will only uninstall the new ones. I know, you can
always uninstall the new ones, install the old ones again and then uninstall
them, and so on, as long as you can remember all the old versions you once
had installed. But when installing the driver the 2nd time, you may end up
with renamed old driver files or .bak's all over your system (especially you
XP and ME guys). What a mess for not spending an extra 2 minutes for one
more reboot when you install new drivers.
So far you've been lucky (well, some of you) and the new drivers work. They
may not work as well as they could, but you'll never know that. You could,
and eventually will, end up with a registry entry pointing to an old driver
file that's not compatible with the a new driver. It could show up as a bug
in Word or Hydravision or whatever, and you'd never know the cause. You'd
probably just keep reinstalling those programs trying to get rid of a bug
that's not even in them. It may just show up as poor driver performance.
Here's an example (I'm not saying this is the case, just a 'for instance').
Cat 3.10s have a fix (more like a temporary work around) for Call of Duty.
Cat 4.1 comes out and it has a better, real fix for CoD, but it's not
compatible with the previous work-around. You install 4.1's over the 3.10's.
Since you've still got that 3.10 file trying to run, or a registry entry
using it, the 4.1's fix for CoD won't work. Crappy driver, doesn't even fix
CoD. So you reinstall the 3.10's right over the 4.1's, and you still end up
with files that won't work together trying to fix the problem. So, CoD no
longer works with the 3.10s. Your conclusion, the 4.10's messed things up so
bad that CoD won't even work with the old drivers anymore. Then, of course,
you want to get on the newsgroup and warn everyone that you had CoD working
good with the 3.10's but you tried the 4.1's and they messed things up so
bad that CoD won't even play right with the 3.10's anymore. (Once again, I
just made up this scenario as an example, but problems just like this have
happened time and time again with ATI, nVidia and everyone else.)
Now, I really appreciate being warned about problems with new drivers or
drivers that are just a waste of time, but when I hear about them, I do
assume that the person reporting the problem installed them the right way.
It boils down to this; you care about your computer's performance. You spend
hours tweaking and tuning to get the maximum frame rates in games and to
have a stable computer. Why not spend an extra 2 minutes when you install
new drivers so all those other hours won't be wasted? 2 minutes more to do
the job right and also get rid of all those unnecessary old files. Certainly
a better use of your time than spanking your monkey.
I didn't mention using the Cat uninstaller. I believe there's a warning on
it, or when you download it. Take it seriously. After I used it, I couldn't
install any ATI drivers. It took my a long time to finally find a
work-around. And yes, I think I used the uninstaller properly. Just be
careful when using it or use it only when necessary.
Hmm, I'm not even sure which reply I put this post under. Anytime I said
"you", I meant "anyone". This isn't pointed at any individual. And of
course, it's just my opinion anyway.
Gary
