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Tuesday, January 22, 2008
[Not again!]
Yesterday was a great day. Today's not so good.
My Dad's been after me to help re-paint the house for a while and we finally started on it today. The last time we re-painted the entire house was back in 1999 and I remembered that it was exhausting. I'll probably upload some before and after pictures later. The colour has changed from light-purple (not my choice, I didn't like it very much, to be honest) to moderately-dark blue. It's a tad darker at night, but I like it.
We started at around 9am today and it took us about 6 to 7 hours to paint just my room. My room was the toughest, I had a lot of crap that had to be moved out into the living room and also a fish-tank that cannot be moved. We did two coats of paint and by the time we finished, moved everything back in and cleaned up, it was almost 5pm.
To prepare the room for painting, my computer table was pushed out into the living room. On the way out, the back of my CPU hit the door frame. Not too serious, because only the wires/plugs at the back of the tower hit the door frame. When it was all done and everything was moved back in, the clock above my computer table fell and hit some of the wires on its way down. These were the only times my rig was possibly subjected to damage.
When I connected everything back together I realised that the TV-out function no longer worked. I was sure I connected everything back the correct way. I tested using other video-in options on my TV (which I knew was working because my X-Box could load just fine), tried pushing in the cable (in case some wires inside the cable snapped), nothing worked.
I then looked through the settings in nVidia's driver. Here's the absolute kicker. I played with the TV-out settings and set them to Singapore's settings (they were previously at "Any" and "NTSC"-something) and after I clicked OK, my screen went blank.
Yes, it happened again. Not sure if I mentioned this in my earlier posts in the beginning of the year regarding my computer troubles, but this happened before. Rebooting doesn't work. Going into Safe Mode doesn't work because the graphics driver isn't loaded and hence I was unable to change the settings. Uninstalling the driver in Safe Mode didn't work because Windows didn't allow it. I was told that the "device was needed for start-up". Actually I don't think it's Windows...It's nVidia who designed their driver that way because I'm pretty sure I've removed a display driver in Safe Mode before in the past in Windows.
Basically, I was locked out of the fully functional Windows desktop by nVidia. When I changed the TV-out signal format. Not even the primary display settings. Seriously, what the fuck?
I was pissed. Looks like I have to format my rig again. At least I wouldn't lose any data, thanks to my regular backup routine.
After formatting, I installed the nVidia driver first to try to sort out the problem. TV-out still do not work...And now I have a new problem. Videos play with artifacts. Basically I get a chess-board pattern on my videos with artifacts representing the squares.
I figured that the display card's probably faulty. Can't do TV-out and artifacts when playing videos. Oddly enough, no problems playing videos if the nVidia driver wasn't installed...But of course, I can't try TV-out then.
I swear, my next display card's gonna be a Radeon. No more nVidia bullshit. I had problems with my previous nVidia card's drivers and as for this one...Honestly, I lost count of all the problems I've encountered.
Assuming we finish both my sister's and my parents' room tomorrow and the living room the day after, I should be able to RMA my display card on Friday. The distributor's in Ang Mo Kio. I don't get it...Why can't they get an office near SLS? Like maybe SLT? Makes things easier for everyone.
I wonder how did a slight tap on the wires cause this much damage. In any event, I really hope that the problem's with the display card. It seems logical to me. If it's not the display card, I think I'm in for yet another marathon troubleshooting session.
Won't be on MSN for the next few days...Can't be bothered to set up my rig when I still haven't figured out what's really wrong (if I didn't care about TV-out, I could just ignore the problem and get everything back up and running). If you need me, email or SMS.
^^^ by Locksley @ 8:31 PM.
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