I’ve been having all manner of problems with Microsoft Vista on my desktop PC. Many of you who read my blog regularly know this, as I’ve been very critical of Microsoft Vista, often because of these problems. I couldn’t play any QuickTime videos from my system drive, video quality was poor, and a lot of things were slow. Of all things, it was QuickTime and iTunes causing me the most problems. I never realized how much I relied on multimedia until I couldn’t use it, especially now with my iPhone. I even have an external hard disk just so I can play videos.
I was talking to some guys today about Vista and all the problems I’ve had. In conversation we discovered that those of us with ATI video cards are having problems, but those with NVIDIA cards are happy. So at lunch I bought a cheap NVIDIA card, installed it, and all of my problems disappeared.
There are a lot of reasons to like NVIDIA. No matter who manufactured my video card I can download the right driver from the NVIDIA web site. Their installer doesn’t litter my machine with control panels and extras that start at boot. Even old cards have decent support built right into operating systems. Now I can add “makes my computer work properly” to the list. I didn’t get any performance improvement over the ATI card, as far as Vista is concerned. The difference is huge, though, in that I can actually use my computer.
Maybe I just had a terrible ATI card, but since I want my computers to work properly I think it’s safe to say that I’m now an NVIDIA guy.
Just curious as to what model of ATI card you had. I’m no ATI fanboy, but I was very happy with my old ATI card. Truth be told, I just switched back to Nvidia when I built my new PC in December. My decision to go back to Nvidia was because of all the griping I had heard on forums about ATI’s horrible driver support in Linux.
I think it was an X600.
ATI used to have the best Linux driver support. Funny how times change.