i started reading this, thinking "what idiots"... then i got a little further down and the analogies made more and more sense. manufacturers are to blame, like the often-dying PNY geforce cards. people come in to the store i work in, claiming that nvidia is a terrible company. true, nvidia's name is on the box... they had a hand in making it, but the gpu is working fine, it's strong. it's the rest of the card that crapped out on them. this particular instance doesn't sound like the fault of nvidia, or the manufacturer though. i'm going to point my crooked little scary-finger at microsoft . windows 2k had some serious issues with AGP compatibility. they did a lot of direct work-arounds, and sent the source to particular manufacturers who wished to be supported by microsoft. some manufacturers didnt pay the thousands of dollars (i'm assuming) to have microsoft's programmers working for them, and didn't get the product. most work-arounds are just a huge problem, and suck up valuable system resources. here's what i'd suggest, if you're decent with computers. get another operating system, and test out your drivers on that. another alternative would be to find other people who have your same video card, and find out if they all had the same problem, on other operating systems. find out if linux has decent support for your particular video card, and if it does, i might suggest that. best of luck.
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