R
Ronald F. Guilmette
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?
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?