Monday, August 28, 2006

Since my new PC was delivered two weeks ago, I didn't know it has video driver incompatibility until I installed 580 mb Rose Online game when Randy left Manila on the 22nd.

The game kept crashing that I had to bring back the CPU to Starapple computers after Alex failed to trouble-shoot the problem last Friday, August 25th. Daughter fixed the HDD partition based on what I liked then, she reinstalled win XP on both partitions. But, she failed to fix the crash problem whenever I ran the Rose Online game.

Tommy suggested to bring the CPU today so we had spent our entire day at Starapple Computer Shop while Alex was busy diagnosing the monitor, sound and video compatibility. I had breakfast and lunch with Pearl and Tommy at Emer's Food Center located at Lower Level, Makati Cinema Square. The food they served was fine that I'd ordered for takeout grilled whole Chicken, Pata, and Pancit Bijon. This Chinese restaurant doesn't charge too much unlike the other restaurants we frequently visited.

Randy and I remotely exchanged chikka messages to update him what's the development with the PC and us. He tried to wait for us to get home but, we're back to zero when the PC crashed again late afternoon and we concluded that ATI RADEON X550's driver needs upgraded version and when we replaced it with 256 mb ATI RADEON X300SE, the said video card was compatible with the existing X550 video driver! Earlier, Win XP was reinstalled in first partition but Alex had difficulty running the audio device since motherboard sound has incompatible driver too. It says in the readme.txt that the sound card will stop running after September 2005, and we're in August 2006 now! After couple of difficult browsing efforts made since they are current PLDT DSL subscribers, and their internet connection, as usual, dropped frequently, it kept delaying us.

Past 6 in the evening, I finally decided to replace the video card Randy bought for Junjun in April, ATI RADEON X550, to lower version, ATI RADEON X300SE, and it cost me Php 2,200.00 for the new video and display adapter. Tommy said some hardware manufacturers supplied wrong version of installer and that the video card was running perfectly but we need a higher version of video driver which we cannot find available for download online. I had been given 48 hours to use the new video card and I left to the shop our video card so they can find a supported driver for it.

We left the computer shop at closing time and was able to chat with Randy who is already online waiting when I logged in this evening. Too bad, Randy was all alone playing Blogshares and Neopets because I was out and busy fixing my PC.

After Randy and I prayed the rosary, I loaded the game and it ran perfectly well. Am so happy it didn't encounter any further crash errors.