If you’ve worked with computers for a while, you’ve probably heard some standard things about maintaining your system. Defrag the hard drive regularly; keep your virus definitions up-to-date; uninstall stuff you’re not using to free up space; update your drivers, especially if you’re trying to fix a problem or get the best performance out of your hardware. My computer recently taught me, however, that updating your drivers is sometimes not a good thing. Sometimes, newer is not better; sometimes, newer is total junk.
A couple weeks ago, I bought a new video card for my aging computer, in order to give it enough juice to run some newer games I’d like to check out. (I will also openly admit that I wanted to be able to run some of my older games at max settings and still get a good framerate. Yes, I’m a geek.) I’d been running an nVidia Quadro4 750XGL for a long while, a piece of hardware I bought when I thought I was going to get into 3D modeling – a hobby that never really developed. The card had done well in running games, something it wasn’t even really built for, but some Source games were a bit clunky, even if I used low settings, and Company of Heroes was even worse. To replace it, I bought a Sapphire X1650 512MB card after poking around on newegg.com. It seemed to have, on average, very good reviews, and it’s AGP, which is all my motherboard supports. Reviewers said that it ran all sorts of newish games very well at high settings, including Half-Life 2, which is a Source engine game. The card sounded right for me.
I got it in short order, due to newegg.com’s wonderful lightning-fast service. After physically installing it into my computer*, I moved on to the next thing: drivers. Thinking I was oh-so-techy, I figured I wouldn’t even bother with the outdated drivers on the CD that came with the video card. Instead, I would get online and get the latest and greatest set, or maybe even some optimized drivers! I went to guru3d.com and surveyed the landscape; aha! I found Omega drivers, which are optimized for performance. I nabbed them. I installed them, rebooted as requested, and then fired up Day of Defeat: Source to see if the new video card made a difference. And wow, what… the hell? Why was Day of Defeat running the same, or perhaps even worse, than it did with the Quadro4?
I tried out other various games I’d played before – Company of Heroes, Counter Strike: Source, Half Life 2. While they were vaguely prettier due to the new card supporting some shading stuff that the Quadro4 didn’t, overall, the difference was nonexistent. Framerates in all of them were awful, sometimes dropping so low that the games were essentially unplayable. Certainly, they weren’t flying, which is what I had expected from all of the rave reviews at newegg.com.
For a week or so I kept trying to play the games, tweaking settings on the video card using the ATI Tray Tools application, which came with my so-very-optimized Omega drivers. Nothing made much of a difference. Day of Defeat: Source, even using all low settings, ran about like it did before. I was quite bummed overall. I felt like I’d spent $75 and ended up with the exact same thing I’d had before.
After toying with settings and staring at bad framerates, I decided that something was not right, and that I should perhaps check out the newegg.com reviews again. 10 minutes of skimming and I found a recurring issue – people loved the cards, but drivers could be problematic. More importantly, many people who had grabbed the latest drivers from ATI – the drivers that the Omega drivers are built on top of – persistently ran into problems. However, if they went back to the old drivers that came on the disk, things were great.
So, going against my usual habits – so long ingrained that they’re more like instincts – I uninstalled the latest and greatest Omega drivers, rebooted my computer, and installed the (rather old and outdated) drivers that came with the video card. I rebooted again, fired up Day of Defeat: Source, and proceeded to oooh and ahhh like I was watching Fourth of July fireworks. Everything was running on high, and it was running fast. I tried Half Life 2, and oooh’d and ahhh’d some more. Company of Heroes had me bouncing up and down in my chair, pointing at stuff and saying things like “check out the texture quality!” I even downloaded the demo of Bioshock, and was very pleasantly surprised to find that it not only ran, but it ran well enough to be quite playable, even on my aging system.
My ATI video card taught me that newer isn’t always better – even when it comes to drivers. I guess I’ll have to amend my “how to fix a computer problem” bible now.
I may end up checking out the official updated drivers, but if things go boom, at least I know the old drivers will work well.
Post Script – Read The Frakking Manual
* The physical installation did not go smoothly. I got the card and rushed to my computer like the overgrown little boy I can be. I’m sure I looked silly, with a big grin across my face.
I yanked the old card out, then pulled the new one out of the anti-static bag it was in. I put it in the computer, hooked the monitor up to it, and pressed the power button on my computer. The monitor clicked on and… nothing. Well, it was something – green, yellow, and red, slashing across my screen in nasty, jagged lines. Not quite what I wanted to see. I tried rebooting the computer (always step #1 if you’re having computer problems), and got the same thing. I then decided that I should perhaps look at the quick start guide. It told me what I already knew: take out the old card, put in the new one, and turn the computer on.
I examined the card closely, and thought that perhaps it wasn’t seated well in the AGP slot. I took it out, and put it in again; that time, I thought I saw it go into the slot a bit deeper. Aha! I thought. This shall yield success. Alas, hitting the power button told a different story. Same jagged lines; same nastiness.
At this point I was in a bit of a panic. Had I gotten a bad card? Would I have to go to the trouble of getting an RMA, sending it back to newegg, and then having another go with a different card? I decided to inspect the box more closely, to see if I’d missed anything important. By that, of course, I mean I really looked in the box for the first time, because upon opening it, all I’d grabbed was the card. That’s all I needed, right?
I found a little power cord. Before I found that, however, I moved the anti-static bag out of the way; when I did that, I noticed that, on the underside of it, there was a sticker. I flipped the bag over. On the sticker, in big red letters:
STOP!!! You MUST plug this graphics board into the power supply of your computer. Please see the Quick Start guide for details.
Oops. I used the power cord the card came with to hook it into my power supply, hit the power button on my system, and – well, imagine that! It worked.
A long time ago, when I first started messing about with computers, I often read in tech forums this simple response (usually not directed at me, to be fair): RTFM. Read the… well, let’s say frakking manual, but that’s not what it stood for. 
Brilliant. Post read A to Z. Not reading manuals, that is so a classic, because “hey, me read a manual?” is what grinning geek boys have as a middle name. The shame afterwards can be painful, admittedly.
I’m glad at least one person read it in full. Due to the length, I was vaguely worried that I’d get a few comments saying “TLDR.”
And indeed, the shame (and sheer feeling of stupidity) can be painful. I felt quite stupid when I saw the STOP!!! sticker on the anti-static bag. Plug the card in, genius.
The longer the posts the better as far as I’m concerned
. What a great read. Driver problems I’ve had a fair share of as well. I guess that’s why they made the rollback feature so easy to access.
You’re not the only one to have not read the manual though. It’s amusing to think that even experience doesn’t necessarily teach you lessons. I’ve put together a number of computers, quite a few in fact and despite that I made a similar mistake. Newer mobos require two power cables from the PSU. Sometime in November I sold my old computer and built another one and alas I forgot to plug in the second power cable. I didn’t read the manual of course but sat in despair, because it wouldn’t work, just staring at the motherboard until I saw the socket and remembered
.
I’ve never used the Windows XP rollback feature. It just sounded… well, like it wouldn’t work! If I screw drivers up, I usually just uninstall them and reinstall another set. However, I’ve had other people tell me that it’s worked well for them in the past.
Indeed, experience doesn’t seem to be teaching me the lesson either. I don’t know how many times I’ve put together a new computer or put in a new piece of hardware, only to run into something that is seemingly insurmountable… until I pick the manual up and read where it says something like “you MUST do X or this will NOT WORK!”
So it’s not just me that just sits there, looking at the computer guts, thinking, “Well, hmm… this is bad. Maybe I should do the unthinkable and look at the manual?”