Monday, January 01, 2007

My Xmas present


... is this 24" LCD monitorPosted by Picasa

Also I upgraded my video card (way overdue) to a XFX GeForce 6200 to take advantage of this new monitor. I got it for under <$40 at Buy.com. That's a pretty good deal. And it's good enough for me since I don't play much games on my PC. All I care is smooth playback of DVD and streaming video!

However, this upgrade was not without challenge: My motherboard ASUS A7V8X-X was a few year old and doesn't have any PCI-Express slot which is used by most of the new video cards. It does have an AGP-8x slot. So I bought the AGP-8x version of the GeForce 6200. And the installation instruction says XP is supposed to be able to detect new hardware and start the new video card driver installation after I put it in the AGP-8x slot but instead XP chose a generic VGA driver for display and that's it. I tried manually installing the GeForce 6200 driver but got an error saying the computer cannot find the hardware, i.e., the new video card!

Usually the best thing to do at this point is to upgrade all software that is too old and could potentially be conflicting with new hardware. In this case, I upgraded the 4-in-1 driver of my mobo (4-in-1 includes the AGP-8x driver) And the problem was solved after reboot! XP detected the card! I'm writing this so that someone who run into this same problem in the future might come across this post by Googling.

Now I'm enjoying full 24" 1920x1200 pixels of DirecTV sling-ed at ~3Mbps! (Oh yeah, I had to upgrade the firmware on my Slingbox to achieve this, of course)