Choices, Choices

A hypothetical question:

There are three conferences that happen to clash. Your boss says that you can choose which one to attend.

Do you pick:

a) "250-year events and beyond" at the International Institute of Actuaries
b) "Loss adjusting in an inflationary environment" at the National Association of Claims Adjusters
c) "Data standardisation in XML for program reinsurance" at ACORD

Answer. Go for the one where the lunch is likely to be best.

BTW, none of the above conferences exists (although there are many like them). Neither do they clash. neither would my boss be so sadistic as to tell me that I had to attend one of them. But, well, someone must go to these things.

Monitoring the detectives

The man brought back my computer last night. He informed me that the company which built the video card that he installed in my machine so that it could run two monitors had gone bust, and that therefore there wasn't a driver that worked with Windows XP. On top of that, he returned the computer in the state that it was when he fucked it up on Friday night -- i.e., hanging as soon as it boots, even in safe mode.

One way to solve this was to enter the system not in safe mode but in one of the special reduced video modes and then to strip out the driver for the new card (which was what I discovered about 2am on the day I tried to install XP for the first time). However, I now know how to get at the card slots on the HP. You need to unscrew a couple of retention screws, which hinges the air-cooler at 90 degrees, allowing you to get to the card slots.


So I did this and took out the video card. And my machine works fine: except, of course, that I only have one monitor.

And the company which manufactured that video card has not gone bust (it's the 3D Phantom XP 3800, I think, made by Pine), although it is a discontinued model. But what should matter is not the card, but the core chipset, which in this case is the SIS 315, manufactured by SIS in Taiwan. And I happen to know that the driver for XP does exist, because this is the driver (unhelpfully numbered version 3.15, a total coincidence) making the damn thing hang.

What I feel fairly sure is happening is that the main video card and the second video card are trying to access the same area of RAM when boot up occurs, hence the hang. This is really irritating, because I feel that the solution is a trivial matter of getting the SIS driver to access another part of RAM, or something like that. And that might be a matter of just changing a single BIOS setting.

I may do some messing around after I buy a new machine. For example, I could swap round the video ocards, so that the SIS is the primary and the NVidia is the secondary. Or I could try some other drivers, to see if they happened to work (the original driver for Windows ME "nearly" worked, but there were vertical lines all over the screen).

So, single monitor-bound again. Sigh. Any recommendations for base units that I could buy into which I can plug two monitors, and they will work without hassle?