Long Story: How I Busted My Video Card

Long Story: How I Busted My Video Card - It was a beautiful day until I decided to watch some music videos from my computer using TV-out. After adjusting the video input connector to gain a better image quality, my cheap ATI Powercolor Radeon X300SE graphics chip/video card somewhat short-circuited resulting to a distorted TV output, and then more problems later on.

My previous video card of the same brand and model had suffered the same fate after using it for only about a month. I had it replaced and have been using the replacement for three months until now. So I called up the store and the clerk said that they cannot replace it anymore but they can still fix it free of charge. I decided against it as I know it will take a long time for it to get repaired.

I needed the video card for my dual monitor setup as it has become a necessity when I’m programming. I extended my LCD display to a CRT monitor and luckily this setup still works on my windows Vista system. But it’s a different story on my openSUSE 10.1, Xinerama mode no longer work as it has been. Even 3D acceleration is messed up which means no more Compiz eye candy. The sad part is that I do all of my programming on Linux and use Vista mostly on multimedia.

I have spent days troubleshooting and googling and even trying different Linux distros like PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, and Simply Mepis (I’ll give my review on these distributions on my next post) just to get my dual monitor setup back but without any success. To make this story shorter, I have contemplated and decided to buy a new video card as soon as I have time to go to Thinking Tools, an electronic shop which is 100 Km. away from my home town. For now I have to stick to the old-fashioned way using a single monitor for my programming and not having to enjoy some multimedia capabilities of Vista.

I’m sharing to you this story not because I wanted you to pity me or I needed some technical help from anyone but because I want to share to you some moral lessons: To be contended of the image equality of your TV-out display especially if you’re using a cheap video card(he he).

Seriously, the best lesson that I learned from this experience is to never dwell on thinking of the convenience I had like when I had the dual monitor setup because I can still work and be productive on what I have right now. I’ll just watch movies with a DVD player and no more watching downloaded music videos for now. End of story.