How the latest ATi driver package scared the living crap out of me

[thespyisdead]

i just have to vent over this issue:

So today i was just minding my own business, being careless on the internet by trying some free VPN clients. after i was convinced that they all suck, i uninstalled all of them and restarted, but booted into a BSOD. After a few recurrences, i decide that it's time to do a system restore, but as it happened, for some god forsaken reason, i did not have automatic system restore on. This is where I asked my room mate to download a windows image for me and put it on a USB stick.

This is where i installed windows, without deleting anything. After which proceeded to install the latest drivers for my GPU from the AMD site. This is where i start to become scared, because I was getting weird a error, and the custom install did not show any supported software. I even preformed a clean install of windows, and still the problem persisted.

Cue the stress and fear that my GPU is fried. This continued for a few hours. After looking at forums I lost all hope. But the thing that really caught my eye, is that both the ATi automatic detection tool and CPU-id detected that there was something there. at this point i thought that the graphics card was definitely gone, since the installer did not do anything and those utilities detected it.

As a last resort, i downloaded the earlier beta drivers, not expecting any better results.

Much to my amazement, it installed everything perfectly!

Bottom line: my beard might have some bald spots now, as well as download the legacy beta ATi drivers, as the current stable release does not work!

but your turn to pitch in on similar scares and/or real hardware faliurs

 

[Barbas]

I had a BSOD recently. I suppose is really is time to upgrade my old 1st generation Core i7 930 to the newer one I bought. Bloody thermal paste worries me, I keep think I'm going to overdo it and break something.

I also got out of my chair, turned and snapped the opened disc tray right off the tower of my very old computer several years ago. Whoops.

 

[Nathan Josephs]

i think the term legacy beta driver just made my brain implode.

 

[Yopaz]

This summer I was going home to my mom as I always do during the summers and then I get to invest some time with my old desktop. However some time after I had started using it I had left it one for a while and as I walked into my room I heard the sound of it rebooting. Oh, we all know Windows likes to spring that one on you from time to time so we don't really consider it anything out of the ordinary. So I walked into my room a few hours later and it was still rebooting.

I stopped for a while, turned on the screen to see the setup screens and a few seconds later my computer blacked out and it tried to boot again. I turned it off using the button and tried turning it on. It went through the same dance, almost reaching Windows before blacking out and starting over. I turned it off completely and unplugged it for the day.

I immediately thought this could be either my power supply failing or a heating issue (never had heating issues before, but it was a possibility). So I decided to clean out the dust that has gathered over the years seeing if that would help. So after cleaning it up I tried booting it up. It went flawlessly and I was able to use it just fine.

Later that day I got a few friends coming over (one was there when my computer died the day before so he knew about it) and I told them that I was certain that my computer would die on me the day before, but that she's working now, I said as I tapped it twice... only to hear the sound of it rebooting over and over...

Long story short I ended up getting a new PSU and it fixed the issues I had. However I was at the gym a few days afterwards and when I got home I noticed that the computer had rebooted on me again. Turned out there was a short power outage and my computer was fine though.

 

[Angelous Wang]

It all about the combination Driver versions and OS versions (and patches).

Sometimes they just don't work together, ether one is too new or one is too old.

Last month all the ports on my soundcard just stopped working (shortly after a windows update), I had never upgraded my sound card drivers since I built the PC years ago because let face it as long as it producing sound I don't care.

Went on a few weeks (I just used the in-built Realtek on the motherboard in mean time)then I finally decided to update the drivers on the sound card a all the ports are working again.

 

[thespyisdead]

i think the term legacy beta driver just made my brain implode.

i might have misused the term, but it's still older than the current stable driver, which does not work