Not the car or truck driver, am talking about the Video driver on my sweet little Acer Ferrari 1100, ya some might ask me when did you buy that, ohh ya that was a secret operation a couple of months ago, when i was browsing and accidentally glanced at a site that was more than happy to sell it at 500GBP, before the thought signals could get processed in my brain cells, my hands were quick to click the buy button, 500GBP for that cute little machine is a steal.

This was a secret mission, my friends already call me a spender, so it went under the covers, what the heck , you earn to spend, isn’t it?

Ok, so installed Win7 when it came out and it installed the drivers and all was fine, but still had some nagging issues with the video driver, I knew something was not right, i put her to sleep, and then wake her up, her LCD face would dance in a thousand colours, and the only way to bring her back to mood is to press her magic re-start button, sometimes everything would be fine, except that the LCD chooses to stay black after resuming from a hibernate session, so back to the magic button again.

Video Card : ATI Radeon X1200 on an AMD X2 64 bit.

Yesterday happened to search for the issue again, and stumbled upon this forum where there were many with the similar issues,

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itprohardware/thread/db12bf08-3360-4511-871b-8fccc73b75ad

Downloaded “DriverCleaner“, a very good tool to uninstall any device drivers without any trace, cleaned the Windows default 8.56 ATI driver and then downloaded this new Catalyst Suite from the ATI site, even thou it says its for Vista, it worked perfectly fine in win7.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Legacy/Pages/integrated_vista64.aspx?type=2.7&product=2.7.5.3.2&lang=English

Everything went fine and got my video back, tried a couple of sleep and hibernate patterns and everything looked more snappier than before, now it resumes faster than before. Looks like a video driver issue seems to have been resolved.

Sometimes, i think , life would be more happier if there can be as easy as a driver re-install or a re-start process to set things on the right track….. is it too much to ask for

Here are the exact thoughts i had in mind for quite some time, but never got around to post it, and today i see the exact thing i had in mind on my friends blog, you could see the huge smile on the face when somebody else has written exactly the same stuff that you had been thinking…. and here is the link to the post.

and the last lines about the pillow driver.. oh yaaa… i always have a pillow packed and all ready to go, when i need it and my friends even tease me that i sit on the steering wheel and drive….

http://ramya-chitrana.blogspot.com/2009/11/being-short.html

The other day was watching the morning BBC on tele and there was this guy talking about some personality test, they are always fun and nice to see the results and have some fun, either silently laughing at ourselves or contemplating what to change

So here are the results from the big 5ive as they call it…. give it a try here – https://www.bbc.co.uk/labuk/ if you are of the naughty type

….and if you know me enuf… you will know if these are right or wrong.

Click to see larger images

Am always amused and fascinated by Icons, during the days of Win 98, i change desktop icons, folder icons and app icons to my likings and sure they give you eye candy to the otherwise boring yellow folders and disk like mycomputer icons.

So if you want to pep up some more colour and fresh air into your comp, here is a site to download icons, they have a huge collection to choose from and am sure you wont get bored.

http://www.iconfinder.net/

Wind back a year and a half ago, my friend, lets call her “Sweth”, she sends me some of her blog posts to me to have a read, it was in Live journal and the site is blocked, so that was when she asked me do you use “Google Reader”, i said i have heard about it, but too lazy to set it up and add feeds.

As everything needs a slight spark and a push to start the ignition, here I am today with my Reader list after an year and a half, thats the first page I open and the first thing to do is to see if any posts out there in the friends section…. , its just midday and will finish the rest of the 90 feeds by evening…

Ohh ya the Tech stuff is a bit long…..

After my win 7 install, ohh ya am back with the same praise about win 7 (ok, i hear somebody shouting, stop this win 7 i’ve heard enuf), am not talking about win 7 here, its just that I happened to install the nVidia drivers and while searching for some image files in the windows folder, i stumbled upon a folder named nVidia 3D, quite intrigued, i opened it and saw some 3D images and nVidia wanted me to setup 3D viewing to view the images, i went through the setup process and presto i have 3D capability, i did not know this till now.

After this had NFS shift installed and i have 3D gaming, and looks fantastic, played a bit and liked it, so need to find time to play more of the 3D stuff , here are some sample pics, you might need this to view these in 3D

Make sure you have 3D glasses to view the images in 3D and here is how it works

No one is born happy…
but all of us are born with the ability to create happiness…,
So today, make other happy, Flash your sweetest smile…
HAVE A DAY FULL OF SMILES

Enjoy your Friday.

Happy

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windows7/default.aspx

Visual studio 2010 beta 2 has released and the itch to try what’s new has again cropped up, but how to do it without screwing up the OS and taking in all the hassle of reinstalling all the softwares and configuring the settings from scratch. This very thought has put be back from trying a lot of betas, but now with the help of Windows 7’s Virtual PC and Disk2Vhd tool, am planning to make an image of the win 7 OS currently on my PC and then run the same on a VM mode and try the beta one… How cool!

I will give this a try and post the results.